The Electric Stars 164
whether I run my turbine in thought or test it in my shop.”
Tesla and Elon are quite similar to each other. As
children, both of them read many books and made exper-
iments. Both studied physics and they moved from other
countries to the US. While Tesla decided not to join the
military by living in the forest for a year, Elon moved to
Canada to avoid joining the military.
In February 2004, the founding team behind Tesla
finished writing a business plan. Their idea was to license
the electric powertrain technology from AC Propulsion and
to use an existing car manufacturer to build the rest of the
car. What they needed now was money, lots of money, so
they began looking for outside investors.
One interesting thing they did was to present Tesla
in front of investors and friends they from the beginning
knew wouldn’t invest in the company because they in-
vested in other areas. “We asked them if we could pitch
to them this goofy car company idea we had,” Tarpenning
said. “We wanted the feedback before we shot our silver
bullets with the real people that might fund us.” Because
of the feedback they received, they changed their business
plan, including the entire distribution model.^453
One of their friends they practiced in front of was Ian
Wright. He had met Eberhard in 1998 when they sat next
to each other on a flight between San Francisco and Tokyo.
They began to talk and realized that both were interested
in cars and they lived only a short distance from each
other. Wright worked as a senior director of engineering
at Network Equipment Technologies and was an amateur