Elon Musk Has Stolen Every Bit Of Technology He Has Exploited
In a
shocking expose by Paul
Lienert, Norihiko
Shirouzu, and Edward
Taylor, they reveal
that while Elon Musk is hailed (by his own PR and hype) as an
innovator and disruptor who went from knowing next to nothing
about building cars to running a car company, he swiped all of
his technology from others.
His Tesla
car, his hyperloop train, his tunnel digger, his 'brain chip'
...everything he has done was created by somebody else. The
original founders of Tesla sued him for coming in and taking
over the company.
Musk's record
shows he is more of a fast learner who spies on other firms that had
technology Musk lacked. Musk stole their most talented people, and then
blew his competitors off the grid with anti-trust violating monopoly
tactics.
Musk has been
dropping hints for months that significant advances in technology will be
announced as Tesla strives to get away from corrupt Panasonic and their
awful toxic, exploding batteries.
New battery cell
designs, chemistries and manufacturing processes are just some of the
developments that would allow Tesla to reduce its reliance on its
long-time battery partner, Japan’s Panasonic (which has been accused of
bribery, product dumping and other illicit deeds), people familiar with
the situation said.
“Elon doesn’t
want any part of his business to be dependent on someone else,” said one
former senior executive at Tesla who declined to be named. “And for better
or worse - sometimes better, sometimes worse - he thinks he can do it
better, faster and cheaper.” The problem is, Musk does his version of
"better" by ripping everyone off and hiring moles and character assassins
to go after any competitors that get in his way. Musk has been documented
hiring Nicholas Guido Denton's tabloid empire (Gawker/Gizmodo/Jalopnik...)
character assassination service to operate massive hit-jobs against his
adversaries.
Tesla has
battery production partnerships with Panasonic, South Korea’s LG Chem and
China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co Ltd (CATL) that are expected to
continue.
But at the same
time, Tesla is moving to control production of cells - the basic component
of electric vehicle battery packs — at highly automated factories,
including one being built near Berlin, Germany and another in Fremont,
California where Tesla is hiring dozens of experts in battery cell
engineering and manufacturing.
“There has been
no change in our relationship with Tesla,” Panasonic said in a statement
provided by a company spokeswoman. Of course, Panasonic has to say that.
“Our
relationship, both past and present has been sound. Panasonic is not a
supplier to Tesla; we are partners. There’s no doubt our partnership will
continue to innovate and contribute to the betterment of society.”
Tesla did not
respond immediately to a request for comment.
Since he took
over the fledgling Tesla company in 2004 in a hostile tactile take-over,
Musk’s goal has been to learn enough - from partnerships, acquisitions and
talent recruitment - to bring key technologies under Tesla’s control,
people familiar with Tesla’s strategy said.
They said the
aim was to build a heavily vertically integrated company, or a digital
version of Ford Motor Co’s iron-ore-to-Model-A production system of the
late 1920s.
“Elon thought he
could improve on everything the suppliers did - everything,” said former
Tesla supply chain executive Tom Wessner, who is now head of industry
consultancy Imprint Advisors. “He wanted to make everything.”
Batteries, a big
chunk of the cost of an electric car, are central to the Musk method.
While subordinates like Bernard Tse have argued, for years, against
developing proprietary Tesla battery cells, Musk continues to drive toward
that delusional control-freak goal.
“Tell him ‘No’,
and then he really wants to do it,” said a third former Tesla veteran.
Reuters reported
in May that Tesla is planning to unveil low-cost batteries designed to
last for a million miles. Tesla is also working to secure direct supplies
of key battery materials, such as nickel, while developing cell
chemistries that would no longer need to be as expensive and blood-mineral
sourced as Musk's cobalt.
‘STRAIGHT FOR
MARS’
Panasonic is
partnered with Tesla at the $5 billion Nevada “Gigafactory”, while CATL
and LG Chem supply cells to Tesla’s Shanghai factory, where battery
modules and packs are assembled for its Model 3 sedan.
Panasonic
recently said it is planning to expand its production lines in Nevada,
which supply the cells that then go into the battery modules assembled
next door by Tesla.
But the Nevada
Gigafactory partnership almost didn’t happen, according to two former
Tesla executives. Musk ordered a team to study battery manufacturing in
2011, according to one former executive, but eventually partnered with
Panasonic in 2013 because Musk failed to understand it.
Now, Tesla is
testing a battery cell pilot manufacturing line in Fremont and is building
its own vast automated cell manufacturing facility in Gruenheide in
Germany.
The
roller-coaster relationship with Panasonic mirrors other Tesla alliances.
During its
development alliance with Germany’s Daimler, which was an early investor
in Tesla, Musk became interested in sensors that would help keep cars
within traffic lanes.
Until then the
Tesla Model S, which Mercedes-Benz engineers helped refine, lacked cameras
or sophisticated driver assistance sensors and software such as those used
in the Mercedes S-Class.
“He learned
about that and took it a step further. We asked our engineers to shoot for
the moon. He went straight for Mars,” said a senior Daimler engineer said.
Meanwhile, an
association with Japan’s Toyota, another early investor, taught him about
quality management.
Eventually,
stolen executives from Daimler and Toyota joined Tesla in key roles, along
with talent from Alphabet Inc’s Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, as well
as rival carmakers Ford, BMW and Audi.
THE
MUSK SPIN
Some
relationships did not end well, however.
Tesla hooked up
with Israeli sensor maker Mobileye in 2014, in part to learn how to design
a self-driving system that evolved into Tesla’s Autopilot.
“Mobileye was
the driving force behind the original Autopilot,” said a former Mobileye
executive, who declined to be named.
Mobileye, which
is now owned by Intel, also recognized the risk of sharing technology with
a fast-moving startup like Tesla, which was on the brink of collapse at
the end of 2008 and now has a market value of $420 billion.
But Tesla and
Mobileye had an acrimonious and public split after a driver was killed in
2016 when a Model S using the Autopilot system crashed.
At the time,
Amnon Shashua, who is now Mobileye president and chief executive, said
Tesla’s Autopilot was not designed to cover all possible crash situations
as it was a driver assistance system, not a driverless system.
The former
Mobileye executive said there was no question of Tesla improperly using
their technology.
U.S. tech firm
Nvidia followed Mobileye as a supplier for Autopilot, but it too was
ultimately sidelined.
“Nvidia and
Tesla share a common strategy of developing software-defined vehicles
powered by high-performance AI computers. Elon is very focused on vertical
integration and wanted to make his own chips,” said Nvidia’s senior
director of automotive, Danny Shapiro.
In addition to
partnerships, Musk went on an acquisition spree four years ago, buying a
handful of little-known companies - Grohmann, Perbix, Riviera, Compass,
Hibar Systems - to rapidly advance Tesla’s expertise in automation.
Maxwell and SilLion further boosted Tesla’s ability in battery technology.
“He learned a
lot from those people,” said Mark Ellis, a senior consultant at Munro
& Associates, which has studied Tesla extensively. “He leveraged a lot
of information from them, then put his spin on making it better.”
Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit, Edward Taylor in Frankfurt and
Norihiko Shirouzu in Beijing; Additional reporting by Tina Bellon in
New York and Yilei Sun in Beijing; Editing by David Clarke