3 members of the 'Tesla mafia' share what they learned from Elon Musk's company
Tesla makes EVs, batteries, robots, and startups.
A steady stream of employees — the "Tesla mafia" — have left to found companies in everything from EVs and batteries to robotics and electric boats.
Electric car startup Lucid was founded by former Tesla executives back in 2007, and the ex-Tesla founders of British EV startup Longbow previously told Business Insider they aimed to deliver a Roadster sports car before Elon Musk's company.
Former senior employees who then raised large amounts for their own startups include former senior vice president of energy Drew Baglino, whose energy firm Heron Power reportedly raised a Series A round of over $30 million in April. Automotive tech startup Tekion, founded by Tesla's former chief information officer Jay Vijayan, is now valued at over $4 billion.
"The success rate of former Tesla employees starting their own companies, building hard things, is exceptionally high," Chris Walti, Tesla's former Optimus lead, told BI.
BI spoke to Walti and two other former Tesla employees about why so many of its former employees have gone on to startup success.
'It's not a Google-like culture, and it's not a 9-to-5 experience'
Gene Berdichevsky, CEO of Sila Nanotechnologies and Tesla's seventh ever employee, said what sets working at the company apart is the sense of "radical self-reliance."
"It's kind of the belief that when you're doing new things, there are no experts to ask, there are no suppliers who have done it before. If there are, you're probably not doing something particularly novel," said Berdichevsky, who left the company in 2008.
Walti, who left the company in 2022 after seven years to start robotics firm Mytra, told BI that Tesla gave engineers unprecedented freedom and responsibility to tackle "really big problems."
"You can solve problems without requiring 20 product managers and five VPs for approval. Here's the problem: go figure it out, go solve it, go talk to whoever you need to get it done," Walti said.
While Tesla's lack of bureaucracy may be liberating, the company is also known for its intense work culture.
Musk and other senior figures have previously slept on the factory floor during crises, and employees are expected to work long hours to meet the billionaires' tight deadlines.
"Tesla is not an easy place to work, but it was never intended to be. It's not a Google-like culture, and it's not a 9-to-5 experience," said Berdichevsky.
Walti said Tesla employees used to jokingly warn each other not to "fly too close to the sun," with Musk having little tolerance for failure.
"Elon has a short fuse. It doesn't matter how many successful projects you've delivered," he said. "You screw up once and you might be out."
Walti added that the intensity of working with Musk led some people to "burn out," and said that working in a system where employees had little say over product direction could be frustrating.
"If you're not too close to the sun, it's a wonderful place to work because you get to work on really meaty problems. You get the innovation, the scale, the tech risk, and you're surrounded by a bunch of really innovative people," he said.
"On the flip side, it doesn't give you a lot of agency over why you're building things. You'll be told ' make the Cybertruck float,' and at no point is there a debate on why; it was like, just go do it," Walti added.
Leaving Tesla
Tobias Kahnert, who founded powertrain startup EFT Mobility, said that starting a new company is often more attractive than taking a job at a rival for Tesla employees.
"We used to call it internally 'the Mount Everest syndrome'," said Tobias Kahnert, who was a senior software engineer at Tesla from 2014 to 2017.
Kahnert joined Tesla right out of college and worked there through the "production hell" of ramping the Model 3 mass-market EV. The idea of founding his own company felt like a natural next move, he said.
"I couldn't see a more exciting company in the world at that point" than Tesla, he said. "The option was either I stay with that company until retirement, which is a long time away, or I start something myself," he said.
Kahnert said the most valuable lesson he learned at Tesla was how to innovate quickly without losing track of the need to scale a product.
"The stretch between these two worlds is something you learn quite quickly at Tesla. You need this spirit of challenging the norms, seeing what's possible, and figuring out ways to get it done without being bogged down too much in processes," said Kahnert.
"But you also actually need to get on the level of working with the process and alongside regulations to even have a product that you can bring into the market," he added.
Walti said Tesla offered a unique experience within engineering of building hard things at scale on a tight timeline, which he called a "trifecta" of speed, scale, and innovation.
"Usually, you have to pick two of the three. At places like Boeing or Lockheed, you're building hard things with innovation, but the timelines are, like, 10 years," said Walti.
"Tesla is a unique place because of the scale. Startups are fast and innovative, but not yet scaled. Innovating with speed at scale is an interesting nexus that really accelerates learning," he added.
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