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When you make it big, you can expect a target to be put on your back.

For example, PayPal made Elon Musk and a few others a very tidy sum of money when it was flogged back in the day, but the company is also fabled for its ‘mafia’, with alumni going on to start or fund prominent companies like Yelp and LinkedIn, and others which operate as direct competition to PayPal.

In the case of Tesla, one of Musk’s later ventures, Forbes reports that “the gang’s most famous capo with his vast Tesla wealth, has spawned a newer mob that might one day rival the original”.

A string of former employees at the carmaker have gone on to form electric vehicle and battery companies, mostly in California…These ex-Tesla staffers are poised to have an outsize impact on the $6 trillion global auto industry in the decades to come…

“Tesla can’t do it alone,” says Peter Rawlinson, Tesla’s chief engineer for its Model S and now CEO of his own electric vehicle startup, Lucid. Musk “needs some competition,”  he adds…

Rawlinson, [Sterling] Anderson and these three other ex-Tesla standouts are getting ready to both compete with, and aid, Tesla’s push to electrify and automate the auto industry. Their companies already have a combined value of more than $30 billion. That’s a fraction of Tesla’s $780 billion market cap, but it’s just the beginning.

We’ve already profiled Henrik Fisker and his wife, Geeta Gupta-Fisker, but let’s turn our attention to Anderson, the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Aurora Innovation.

He was closely involved with the Tesla Model X crossover, having arrived at the company in 2013, and also led development on the Autopilot driver-assist feature.

Three years later, he co-founded Aurora, which is all set to be a major player in autonomous vehicle technology, and is estimated to be worth a cool $10 billion.

Tesla’s seventh employee, Gene Berdichevsky, was hired in 2004 for his expertise in battery design. He left Tesla in 2008, and founded Sila Nano in 2011:

The battery outfit has since developed a silicon-based anode to replace costlier graphite. The material could make batteries used by Tesla and other EV makers at least 20% more efficient and eventually maybe improve performance by 50%, according to the company.

Sila Nano is valued at an estimated $3,3 billion.

Rawlinson (below), who co-founded Lucid Motors, was said to get on with Musk “like a house on fire” when he first joined Tesla in 2009.

That changed after he left the company in 2012, having grown frustrated with Musk over the Model X development program:

Now he’s CEO of Lucid Motors, a Newark, California-based electric vehicle startup charged up with $1.3 billion of funds from Saudi Arabia. Deliveries of top-of-the-line luxury electric Air sedans, able to go more than 500 miles per charge and priced at $169,000, begin this spring.

“I’m not competing with Tesla’s product; I’m competing with Mercedes-Benz,” says Rawlinson.

Shots fired.

Forbes goes on to list a few other former Tesla employees who are now operating in the same space, and you can read the rest of that report here.

Meanwhile, Musk manages to find the time to tweet memes and punt Dogecoin:

Dojo 4 Doge

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 21, 2021

If you’re confused, here’s an explainer on that front.

Billionaires, hey?

[source:forbes]