In 2003, Elon Musk and Harold Rosen, the engineer who invented the geostationary satellite,
had lunch at a seafood restaurant near SpaceX headquarters in LA.
Harold brought along Jeffrey Brian Straubel, better known as JB Straubel.
Together, they tried to convince Elon to build an electric plane.
Elon wasn’t interested, but then, the conversation turned to electric cars.
JB had spent his time at Stanford building and racing solar-powered cars that relied
on lithium-ion batteries.
He wondered what would happen if you packed thousands of them together.
He believed he was onto something big.
No one saw the potential.
Except Elon…who, having made a fortune when his X.com merged with PayPal, which was bought
by eBay, offered JB $10,000 to support his side project of developing a new battery solution
for electric cars.
“If we hadn’t had lunch in 2003, Tesla wouldn’t exist, basically.”
JB introduced Elon to his friends at AC Propulsion, who had built the tzero.
Elon fell in love with the electric sports car that could go 0 to 60 in under five seconds.
He felt it could change people's perception of EVs, which were seen as uninteresting at
the time.
Despite Elon’s offer to fund commercializing the vehicle, the AC Propulsion guys weren’t
interested, prompting JB to recall in Ashlee Vance’s biography on Elon Musk, “...they
were sort of hopeless at business and refused to do it.”
(page 99)
So, Elon set out to build his own tzero.
AC Propulsion’s head Tom Gage mentioned there were three other engineers who were
interested in building an electric car.
Martin Eberhard and Mark Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors in 2003.
Ian Wright joined a few months later.
Elon invested $6.5 million in Tesla initially and became the largest shareholder and chairman
of the company’s board.
Not long after Elon joined Tesla, he hired JB as an engineer for $95,000 a year.
(May 2004)
He has said the worst decision of his career was to get involved with so many partners
and not start Tesla with just JB.
Elon respected JB for his immense engineering talent, which he honed as a kid growing up
in Wisconsin.
When JB was thirteen, he hauled home an old golf cart from the dump and got it working
again by rebuilding the electric motor.
A lab accident in high school left a two-inch scar on his left cheek.
He once converted his Porsche into an electric vehicle.
At Tesla, the most complicated task was building the battery pack.
We’ve spent the majority of our engineering resources on how to make a battery pack work
well, be long lived, and provide this kind of range and acceleration in an automotive
environment at a cost that’s competitive with vehicles on the road today.
The innovation came with significant challenges.
The batteries could explode if they got too hot.
If a single cell overheated, it could cause a domino effect, triggering neighboring cells
to overheat, potentially sparking a fire.
(show broll of firecrackers).
And JB was packing thousands of them together.
After working on the problem for months, he and his team engineered a sophisticated thermal
management system designed to keep the battery pack within a safe temperature range.
They also developed software to monitor the state of each cell in the battery pack to
detect any sign of a problem.
JB was the most important member of the technical team and got promoted to Chief Technology
Officer a year later.
In addition to his engineering prowess, JB had another invaluable skill.
He was the calm mediator between Elon and the rest of Tesla’s employees.
The go-to person to pass along messages to the team.
In a conversation with Ashlee Vance, JB confided:
“Elon is incredibly difficult to work for, but it’s mostly because he’s so passionate.
It seems like people can get afraid of him and paralyzed in a weird way.
I try to help everyone to understand what his goals and visions are…”
JB happily worked in the shadows, never seeking the limelight.
All he cared about was pushing the electric vehicle revolution forward.
I think five, 10 years from today, we’re going to see an even more rapid shift than
people are predicting toward all-electric vehicles
But the journey was far from smooth.
Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, which featured about 7,000 battery cells packed together,
went way over budget and fell behind schedule.
The company nearly went bankrupt in 2008.
After barely squeaking by, Tesla set its sights on its next challenge, a luxury sedan.
JB advocated for integrating charging capabilities into the Model S.
This was prior to the Supercharger network being fully developed.
He favored this approach over battery-swapping, which Elon seriously considered
Clip What if people do want to switch out their battery pack?
He even promoted it at an event in 2013, demonstrating that it took less time to swap out a battery
than to put a tank of gas in a conventional car.
However, battery swapping was not the best option, given the high cost of building battery-swapping
stations and the technical complexity.
The Supercharger network has proved to be the right strategy, offering Tesla a huge
competitive advantage.
Tesla has now opened up its charging network for other automakers to use.
JB helped transform Tesla into a mass-market car maker.
He spearheaded the construction and operation of Tesla’s first mega battery factory, Gigafactory
Nevada, aimed at boosting battery production for the Model 3.
This factory is going to be about 6 million square feet of ground area.
We can fit about 100 747s parked in the footprint of this building.
Not only that, we can fit 50 billion hamsters.
Today, Teslas go much further than many other electric cars thanks to its high-powered battery
tech.
In 2019, JB stepped down as Chief Technology Officer and transitioned to an advisory role,
handing over the reins to his protégé Drew Baglino.
I'd like to thank JB for his fundamental role in creating and building Tesla.
Thank you, JB.
It's been quite an adventurous 16 years.
When he reflected on his departure, Straubel said: “It has been a really tough decision
because I feel like I’m letting a lot of people down.
But, also, you have to live life.”
He was raising young twin boys with his wife Boryana, whom he met at Tesla when she worked
in human resources.
But…tragedy would strike his family.
On the morning of June 19, 2021, Boryana was biking in the cycling lane on a rural Nevada
road when a car traveling in the opposite direction crossed over to her side of the
road and struck her, killing her.
She was 38 years old.
Boryana was an advocate of environmental sustainability and founded a jewelry company that used recycled
metals for its designs.
JB has continued to honor his wife's legacy through his work on sustainability.
After leaving Tesla, he launched Redwood Materials, a startup that recycles lithium-ion batteries,
including scrap from the gigafactory, to create new battery materials.
The mission is not only to avoid waste but to disrupt traditional mining by recycling
elements like nickel, cobalt, and lithium for use for automakers.
This could lower EV prices by reducing the cost of battery packs, one of the most expensive
components in an electric car.
JB was the heart of Tesla from the onset…the steady hand behind the larger-than-life CEO.
And now, he’s back.
JB rejoined Tesla as a member of its board of directors in the spring of 2023.
It will be interesting to see what else he has to offer Tesla and the entire EV industry
in the years ahead.
JB Straubel’s talent as an engineer has helped revolutionize the electric car industry.
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Thanks for watching.
I’m Cindy Pom.