from Straubel. For one thing, he’s not blithely
optimistic about the current climate situation
(“It’s probably going to be a lot worse than most
people expect,” he says). For another, his conversa-
tion lacks corporatist sheen; he has an anxious en-
ergy about him, and when he talks about himself,
he almost physically winces. But when you ask him
about an engineering system or a business plan,
he’ll seize the question with almost adolescent ani-
mation, dive like a marlin, and then resurface after
a while with an apologetic smile, asking, with a bit
of concern, “Does that make sense?”
Straubel leanS over a bright red 1984 Porsche
that his staff pulled out of his personal Carson City
Airport hangar. “Man, this is in bad shape,” he says,
looking under the hood. “It makes me feel old.”
As a Stanford University student in the 1990s,
Straubel bought the car for $800. Its engine was
shot, and he dragged it back to the university and
began ripping it apart. Long before the first 2008
Tesla Roadsters rolled off the line, he had remade
this junker into an electric supercar. Its top speed:
110 m.p.h.
Straubel has always had a project going. As a
young child in 1970s-era Green Bay, Wis., they
mostly involved Legos. In sixth grade, he built a
miniature hovercraft, and in eighth grade rebuilt an
old electric golf cart. In high school, he made a min-
iature blast furnace to melt down metal scrap out
of a pony keg, a leaf blower, and an acetylene torch.
Once, while trying to break down hydrogen perox-
ide into water and oxygen, he set off an explosion in
his parents’ basement. Carol Straubel, his mother,
was outside doing yard work at the time. “I knew
it was JB,” she says. “I went running in the house
about the same time he came running up the stairs
with blood streaming down his face.” Straubel still
has a faint scar on his left cheek from the accident.
Straubel became a darling in Stanford’s engi-
neering department—“one of the most amazing
students to cross my path in the past decade,” a
professor wrote, endorsing Straubel’s plan to pur-
sue a self- designed major in energy systems. He
began racing solar-powered vehicles with a student
group, and started his electric-Porsche project. The
rebuilt car had incredible performance—electric
motors are able to transfer torque to the wheels
of a car much more efciently than combustion
engines—but with its heavy, low-yield lead-acid
batteries, it was barely able to make it 30 miles on
a charge. As Straubel roved between projects and
consulting gigs after college, he began thinking
about a way to fix the problem: using new, light-
weight lithium-ion cells to make an electric car that
could travel for hundreds of miles.
Straubel founded Tesla Motors with Mar-
tin Eberhard, Marc Tarpenning, Ian Wright, and
Elon Musk in the early 2000s, with a plan to sell
electric sports cars. They soon hit a wall: lithium-
ion cells—approximately the size and shape of AA
batteries—could explode if they got too hot, and
Straubel’s team was packing thousands of them
together. If a single defective cell overheated, the
entire battery pack could go up like a chain of fire-
crackers. After months of work, Straubel and his
team figured out a system to dissipate excess heat
and prevent disaster. Then, following a series of
lengthy meetings in 2007, Straubel managed to
convince engineers from Japanese electronics giant
Sanyo that the tiny startup had developed a way
to produce lithium- ion battery- powered cars that
wouldn’t be rolling chemical bombs.
Eberhard left Tesla under acrimonious circum-
stances in 2007, and Tarpenning exited soon after,
leaving Musk and Straubel as the only remaining
co-founders when Tesla’s Roadster launched in
2008 (Wright had left in 2004). Then came the
Model S in 2012, and the white- knuckle ramp-
up to produce vast quantities of the mass-market
Model 3 from 2017 to 2019, an effort that brought
Tesla into the automotive big leagues and crys-
tallized, in the boardrooms of every carmaker,
that internal- combustion vehicles were on their
way out. Musk was the public face of the com-
pany, while behind the scenes Straubel devel-
oped some of Tesla’s most crucial projects, like
its charging network and first battery plant. “He
didn’t compete with Elon for attention,” says Gene
Berdichevsky, an early Tesla employee. “He doesn’t
care for it. As long as he got to achieve the mission,
he was willing to let a lot of things go.”
An illustrative example of the dynamic between
the financier-CEO and his top engineer came at a
2014 meeting of Tesla executives at the company’s
Fremont, Calif., auto plant. For about five years,
Straubel and his team had been developing batter-
ies meant to store renewable electricity and release
it onto the grid when the sun wasn’t out or the wind
wasn’t blowing, and an executive at the meeting
asked Musk about the project. Apparently Musk
hadn’t heard of it: “What are you talking about?”
he said to about 50 members of Tesla’s top leader-
ship, according to Mateo Jaramillo, former head of
Tesla’s energy division. The executive who raised
the issue then pointed out a window, toward a set of
prototype batteries installed in the factory’s park-
ing lot. Musk looked out the window, then turned
to address the room: “Let me be very clear: abso-
lutely no one should be working on that right now.”
Straubel pressed ahead with the grid battery
project anyway, providing “cover” for his sub-
ordinates to keep working on it, according to Ja-
ramillo. One former Tesla employee, who spoke
under the condition of anonymity because he con-
tinues to work in the industry, says Musk barely‘[CLIMATE CHANGE IS] GOING TO BE AA LOT WORSE THAN PEOPLE EXPECT.’
LOT
A LOT WORSE THAN PEOPLE EXPECT.’WORSE
A LOT WORSE THAN PEOPLE EXPECT.’
THAN
PEOPLE
E XPECT.’
68 Time June 20/June 27, 2022
WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM