Tesla Motors recently filed to go public. Behind the success story is a strange tale of founders. You should read first the Wikipedia page about Tesla. You will see that there are five founders. Because there’s been a litigation and a judge decision, it shows that defining a founder is not so easy. My definition of founders would be limited to Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, but because their initial business angel has become the CEO, it is more complex according to the judge.

What is even more interesting is that Elon Musk, the BA and CEO, was a founder of Paypal, or more precisely of one of the two start-ups which merged to give Paypal (X.com and Confinity). Then he was fired or left Paypal, similarly to what Musk did to Eberhard and Tarppening. Amazing, no?

So I provide here two cap tables! The Tesla one first and the Paypal one follows. I hope you will appreciate the information and you can react about founders, investors and the sometimes sad stories behind the scene of success stories…

First the Tesla equity tables and investors. Click on the pictures to read them!

The reason why there are green cells is because the company is not public yet. So the IPO date and price per share are fictitious. I do not know how much the founders exactly have but there was apparently about 8M founders’ shares. Now the company has raised a lot of money:

Finally, here is how the share dilution occured:

Am I doing here a Freudian analysis? Whatever is the Paypal stories through the X.com and confinity merger:

The equity table

and the investors

The beauty of all this is that behind the numbers, their complexity, there are many untold stories about founders, business angels, investors and success. React…