knew anything about the Tesla energy division
until the staff briefed him on it before the official
reveal in 2015. Then, at the launch, Musk strode
onto a stage and billed Tesla Energy as the “miss-
ing piece” of the global energy transition. (Musk
did not return multiple requests for comment.)
Straubel says Musk supported Tesla Energy and
was involved before the reveal, though it “certainly
wasn’t his focus” earlier on. Straubel doesn’t re-
member the Fremont incident, but he says sim-
ilar situations occurred from time to time, with
Musk attempting to pull resources from projects
Straubel supported, like Tesla’s Supercharger net-
work, to address concerns he considered more ur-
gent. “It’s always my approach to try and some-
what calm things down, and say, ‘OK, great, we’re
stopping, we understand,’ ” Straubel says. Later he
would talk to Musk and “more calmly” explain the
reasons to keep the program going.
Straubel is reluctant to get into too much detail
about how things worked between him and Musk.
“Some of this stuff is a lightning rod of controversy
that I just do not want to wade into, frankly—I’m
tiptoeing around how we even talk about this stuff,”
Straubel says. “I know people are fascinated by [my
relationship with Elon], but there’s no real benefit
in trying to thread the needle on this. You’ll risk
finding a way to piss him off on something that
you say, probably unintentionally, and then have
him more frustrated at you, or who knows what.”
Musk’s success has left behind a series of dis-
gruntled partners, silenced critics, and inves-
tors who have taken him to court. Straubel’s ten-
ure created no such controversies, and though
he was known as a loner, former employees say
he showed a great deal of personal warmth, and
he tried to insulate employees from stress com-
ing from the top. Meanwhile, Musk, the extrovert,
would rain down arbitrary- seeming demands. “An-
other term for Elon—I won’t attribute it, it’s not
mine—is that Elon is a random- number genera-
tor,” says Jaramillo. “You’re like, ‘Well, what did
the random- number generator spit out today?’”
Musk was also known for his coldness. “Elon just
doesn’t like people,” says Kurt Kelty, Tesla’s former
director of battery technology, now an executive at
Sila Nanotechnologies, a battery firm. Other for-
mer colleagues say Straubel would shield employ-
ees from Musk’s disfavor by keeping staff members
who might slip up out of meetings with him. Many
former Tesla workers jumped at the chance to talk
about Straubel, as if they’d been waiting all this
time for somebody to finally ask about him, instead
of Musk. “[JB has] a passion to do better for the79△
The future
Redwood
battery-
materials
processing
facility, under
construction
outside
Reno, Nev.