The founder of Tesla has given a brutal statement about Elon Musk in a rare interview.
The mogul appeared in an exclusive interview with YouTuber Kim Java where he talked about the founding of Tesla, detailing how he had a spark of inspiration for the name during dinner at Disneyland.
Martin Eberhard first founded Tesla back in July 2003, with Musk being an early investor in the business before becoming the chairman of the board of directors and the largest shareholder of Tesla in 2004.
During the chat, Eberhard said: “I had been thinking about a name for the company for a while now and I didn’t like anything. I tried this and tried that and I - naming a company is difficult anyways, I never pick on somebody for the name of the company because if you manage to get the domain name and get the trademark, congratulations, no matter how lame the name - but so I had thought of a lot of lame names that I didn’t like.
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“The idea of Tesla came to me because I was thinking about the motor I wanted to use. It came to me while I was on a date with a woman who became my wife.
“We went to dinner in Disneyland. There’s a cool restaurant in Disneyland, it’s called the Blue Bayou… it overlooks the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.”
When asked if he uses Grok or ChatGPT, Eberhard simply stated ‘No’, before adding: “I’ve fooled around with them. I fooled around with them with disappointing results. You know, what I don’t like about my experiences with ChatGPT is the way that I can pose it a problem and will give me an answer with full confidence and it turns out it’s wrong and then I’ll point out that it’s wrong and and it will make some corrections and it’s still wrong.
And I’ve gone through, you know, multiple iterations of that and I’ve tried this on a subject where I understand the field, so I know what the right answers are and I see it’s just wrong… So this I find to be dangerous.”
Speaking about Musk, Eberhard continued: “The weird thing is I’ve been out of the company since… end of 2007 and yet every now and then he decides to attack me again on some social media platform and or even on the stage at TED, he’s done that which is kind of weird.”
The founder of Tesla added: “I mean, somebody had pointed out that I’m still occupying real estate in his head which is kind of funny when you think about it.”
And a reconciliation looks to be pretty unlikely. When asked about the possibility, Eberhard replied: “No, I don’t think so. No, I can’t imagine how that would happen from either one of us. I mean, you know, he’s pretty set in his ways. So, no, I can’t imagine that.”