Another Iceberg, Right Ahead 226
of anything, basically wire the funds and say ‘Use it,’ or else
we wouldn’t be able to make payroll,” Elon said. “Either I
went all in, or Tesla dies. I didn’t want to look back and say
there was something more I could have done and didn’t.
I never thought I’d have to invest as much of my own
money [in Tesla] as I did. I thought I would invest $20 to
$30 million of my own funds and in the end I had to spend
$70 million, which was quite painful.”55,235,331
Because Elon invested more money, the other investors,
who had been negative to Tesla’s future, became more con-
fident and followed him. “When you define an investment
and say: ‘The train is leaving the station, do you want to
be on that train?’ is a different question to investors than
‘Do you want to start with a black sheet of paper, you don’t
know if others will follow, and make an offer,’” an investor
in Tesla said. “All of sudden, fear shifted to greed, and
everyone wanted a piece.”^413 The investors finally agreed to
invest more money on Christmas Eve 2008. If they hadn’t
agreed before the day was over, Tesla would have gone
bankrupt. But Tesla wasn’t saved – they had only bought
some time^389
In the documentaryRevenge of the electric car, Elon
and his team are walking around in a storage area stuffed
with assembled Roadster. But all cars had some minor
fault or missing parts, so they couldn’t be delivered to
their owners. “We had bought 80 percent of the parts for
hundreds of cars, but since we didn’t have the remaining
20 percent of the parts, we couldn’t ship [the cars] and get
paid for it,” Elon said.^196 When the cars began rolling out,