Starting a private company and then selling it to some tool doesn’t make these guys great people.

Engineering a practical prototype for an electric sports car in the year 2003 makes you pretty cool, if nothing else.

Lacking the easy access to low-interest credit and being hedged out of the SUV-heavy American car market doesn’t make them bad people.

They exploited their employees and sold the company to some guy to exploit some more

The company had exactly three people in it when Elon Musk arrived with $6.5M in Series A investment cash. They were both forced out of the company in 2008, as the Series B funding was exhausted and Elon was leveraging his fundraising clout to monopolize control of the board. This was long before the Gigafactory and the big labor abuses we’re familiar with today.

I wouldn’t call them geniuses or pretend they were irreplaceable. These were a couple of car hobbyists who stumbled into a cut-throat industry and got their work snatched out from under them.

But then I wouldn’t call the Tesla a particularly amazing piece of technology. Just something a couple of car hobbyists realized was possible with existing technology and made a (small) fortune scaling up.

The real genius in the end was scamming the Department of Energy out of billions of dollars and helping gas guzzlers fake their EV quota.