4, if you count his early influence and, I believe, founding of OpenAI. Albeit, he was not instrumental in the OpenAI as we know it today, but he set it in motion by hiring Sam Altman as the CEO, among other things.
You have to count OpenAI. It is the only other company he has built alongside SpaceX (unless you count the unimportant ones like The Boring Company; the original comment implies we are not counting them).
He has certainly helped maintain Twitter, Tesla, and PayPal at different points, but they were already built before he arrived.
If that were what it means to build a company, an operating company can never be built. There is no end to defining the product, the path to profitability and executing on that vision. You would always be building, never reaching a point where it can be spoken of in the past tense.
That's fine if we want to hold that definition, but then your insistence that Musk built Tesla does not logically follow.
Dumping a bunch of 18650s and an electric motor into a Lotus as a one-off demo is less than what the Cybertruck team did in 90 days. I'm not very impressed with the initial team to be honest.
How big do you think it was exactly when he joined? And at what level of product maturity?
1%. It is at 2% now. Which isn't a knock on what Tesla is doing today, but to tell how it pales in comparison to what the company will be doing 1,000 years from now. We are still in very early days.
If that is how you want to measure it, Tesla hasn't been built yet. It is still under construction. No matter how you slice it, it is impossible for Musk to have built Tesla.
