Before Elon Musk was Tesla's CEO, Tesla had three. Martin Eberhard, 2003 to August 2007. Michael Marks, interim, August to December 2007. Ze'ev Drori, December 2007 to October 2008. Here's what that era looked like. The Roadster's two-speed transmission failed. First Xtrac, then Magna. Neither gearbox could reliably survive an electric motor's torque. Months of delays. Magna then sued Tesla for $5.6M. In the end Tesla dropped two speeds completely, redesigned the motor and inverter, and went with a single-speed gearbox built by BorgWarner. The money was worse. Tesla's 2007 prospectus said each Roadster would cost about $65,000 to build. Musk later said early cars came close to $140,000. Even after the price went up to $109,000, every car still cost $90–100K to build. Tesla lost money on every Roadster it sold. Then came the 2008 crash. Tesla had over 1,200 orders and had delivered only about 50 cars. Elon took the CEO job in October 2008. That December he put the last of his PayPal money into Tesla. His trust put in about $20M of a $40M note round. In his words, the round closed at 6pm on Christmas Eve, "last hour of last day possible or payroll would've bounced 2 days later." He never wanted the title. Under oath in 2021: "I rather hate it and I would much prefer to spend my time on design and engineering, which is what intrinsically I like doing." And: "I tried very hard not to be the CEO of Tesla, but I have to or frankly Tesla is going to die." Legacy media likes to call him reckless. The record shows a man who bet everything he had on a company that was about to die, and took a job he didn't want so it wouldn't.