Case Study: Tesla Motors

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Tesla Motors was incorporated on July 1st, 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Their primary goal in starting the company was to commercialize electric vehicles. They started with an expensive, premium sports car aimed at early adopters. But they soon moved as rapidly as possible into more mainstream vehicles, including sedans and affordable compacts. Eberhard and Tarpenning were the first financiers of the company before the Series A Round of funding, which is the term typically given to a company 's first significant round of venture capital investment. The Series A Round was led by Elon Musk who then joined the Board of Directors as Chairman. Although Eberhard was CEO until 2007 and Tarpenning was vice president of electrical engineering, …show more content…

It was not until 2006 that they were ready to unveil the Roadster to the world. On July 19th, 2006 they put together a huge event for the unveiling of the vehicle. They were taking orders for Roadsters at $100,000 each and people loved them. They sold 127 in the first two weeks after the unveiling. At this point Tesla and Eberhard started blowing up. The Roadster was getting rave reviews and Eberhard was being credited for creating the first ever electric sports car. It was at this point that Musk felt insulted that he was being left out of the interviews and not getting the credit he deserved for the help he put into creating the car and starting the company. It was also at this point that the company started running into some problems with production. They were supposed to start shipping their cars in 2006 but didn’t end up doing so until 2008. There were problems with funding and during production they ran into issues with the design itself that had to be changed. Musk was the one who noted most of the problems and came up with most of the solutions. Also at this point Eberhard’s duties as CEO were proving to be too much for him to handle. The company seemed to be getting out of hand and he said it was because he had never run a company that big before. It became apparent that it was time to bring in some help. He and Musk talked about the idea of bringing in a new CEO to run the logistics while he worked on …show more content…

However they were having trouble finding a successor and reporters started asking Eberhard if he was getting replaced. In August of that year Eberhard was at a conference when he got the call from Musk being informed that the board had made the decision without him and that he was out. The early investor and former CEO of Flextronics Michael Marks was to be the new CEO of Tesla. Eberhard felt a little betrayed by the board for doing this behind his back and without him being there to defend himself. Musk did remind him that it was his very own idea to find a new CEO months ago but Eberhard still didn’t like the fact that he was left out of the meeting that decided this. Marks was the new CEO and that left Eberhard to sit on the board and was left off everything except troubleshooting and small issues. He had essentially been stripped of and left out of his own company. The ordeal was very strange to Eberhard. Musk simply just didn’t think Eberhard could perform his job anymore so he got rid of him and brought in a new guy to do it. But Marks was never actually hired he was just brought in to do the job and keep the company afloat until they found the real CEO for the job. Marks knew he wasn’t the best man for the job but he did exactly what he was brought in to do. He helped stabilize the company and get it ready to start shipping its

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