Elon Musk was a co-founder who had at least $70 million of his own money in Tesla. And he did found SpaceX in 2002 and has over $100 million of his own invested in the company.
Cofounder is someone that is there from day 1.
Tesla Roadster existed before Musks's involvement.
Martin Eberheard searched for Ventura Capital,
one of his leads was Elon Musk.
Tesla was really started by a small company called AC propulsion. They made the prototype roadster. Elon and Martin both approached AC separately to take the car to Mass Market but they wern't interested, so Elon and Martin teamed up. Elon financed the company and Martin ran it. However in 2008, after a series of massive mistakes, Elon had to recap the company with every penny he had and Martin was fired.
Lesson is. Corporate history is a lot like hotdogs. They have equal claim co-founder status.
I stand corrected on SpaceX... yes it seems Musk founded it.
But on Tesla Motors the fact of the matter is that it was started by engineers (Eberheard and Tarpenning) and control was taken away by an investor (Musk)
Some facts:
1. The first wikipedia page review on Tesla Motors from Jue 12, 2006 [1]:
"The firm was started in 2003 by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning....
Tesla has also managed to secure initial funding from prominent investors, such as PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, and Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page."
RedHerring Article July 8 2006[2]:
"Tesla Motors said earlier this month that it has raised a $40-million Series C round of financing led by VantagePoint Venture Partners and Elon Musk"
Finally from Eberheard himself [3]: "Mr. Musk was one of the leads I followed."
From what I remember from The Paypal Wars (highly recommended):
There was a culture clash when X got bought by Paypal. Elon was in charge of X and became the CEO of the combined company (as Peter Thiel took a leave of abscence) and wanted to switch from Unix to Windows. Max Levchin, the main tech guy at Paypal hated that idea. Elon initially got his way, and Max got marginalized. He then started looking into fraud cases and discovered that fraud, although low as a percentage of revenue, was growing rapidly. Max then persuaded people that the #1 priority should be to fix the fraud issue before it would kill them, and that they didn't have the time to worry about the technology stack. Elon Musk got kicked out, Peter Thiel came back to Paypal as CEO and Max managed to squash the fraud problem. Their competitors either failed to get traction or got crushed by fraud. With Paypal as the last one standing they won and got bought by Ebay.
He was fired from Pay-Pal He didn't start Tesla Motors (that was Martin Eberhard) He didn't start spaceX
He is good at marketing though...