Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk could be Steve Jobs. If only his visionary companies and products were successes. Today's featured commenter, growhappy, connects more dots between Steve and Elon:

When visionaries clash, whose vision do we believe? On newsstands this week, Newsweek's Dan Lyons savages Tesla Motors, the electric-car maker. Tesla was once the brightest hope of Silicon Valley's clean-transportation industry; now on its fourth CEO in less than two years, it's better known for manufacturing…

The liquored-up consensus at San Francisco watering hole Joey & Eddie's last night: Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk is actually kind of hot. Musk, who drove up in one of his electric car startup's Roadsters to speak to me yesterday, is divorcing sci-fi novelist wife Justine and has taken up with a British actress, Talulah…

I confess: I completely missed the Tesla Roadster parked outside when I walked into Joey & Eddie's, the San Francisco watering hole where Valleywag used to hold weekly meetups with readers. But there was no mistaking the guy parked at the bar: It was Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla Motors. He had driven up to surprise me…

Tesla Motors, Silicon Valley's troubled electric carmaker, is still running on financial fumes, with $9 million or less in the bank. It's been widely misreported that the company has already raised $40 million. In fact, that's the amount it's hoping to raise, in the form of convertible debt, from current investors in…

Having laid off 75-some employees and run his electric carmaker's cash balance down to $9 million, what is Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk busying himself with? Conducting a witch hunt to find who leaked Tesla's financials to Valleywag. The Truth About Cars has published an email it claims is from Musk, which includes a…

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has strong opinions on what causes poverty: lack of education. For a Stanford dropout, that's remarkably self-reflective. We would add to Musk's list two other causes of poverty: funding a money-losing electric-car company and getting an expensive divorce.

Tesla Motors, the automaker which is Silicon Valley's best hope to build an electric-car industry, will run out of cash in three months if it does not raise new financing. CEO Elon Musk has confirmed Valleywag's report that it has spent most of its customers' deposits and is running low on cash. In an interview with…

The Valley's hottest electric-car maker is running on fumes. Tesla Motors, the brightest hope of Silicon Valley's nascent clean-automotive industry, has only $9 million in the bank, a longtime employee tells us. The company, which recently laid off dozens of employees and announced the closing of its Detroit office,…

To anyone familiar with Elon Musk's brief, troubled career as CEO of PayPal, the troubles at Tesla Motors, his electric-car startup, seem all too predictable. As does his spin on his decision to lay off dozens of employees, close Tesla's Detroit office, postpone a new model, and replace Ze'ev Drori as CEO. Musk blames…

It's typical for aging entrepreneurs in mid-career to acquire a fancy new set of wheels. Elon Musk has instead acquired a job running a fancy carmaker — Tesla Motors, the electric-car startup he has backed from the get-go with the millions he made selling Internet companies. He is also getting a divorce, according to…

Elon Musk, the Tesla Motors investor who has freshly installed himself as the electric automaker's CEO, has explained his management coup and the company's pending layoffs in a blog post. Tesla's $47 million engineering center outside Detroit, near the automotive industry's biggest pool of technical brains? Gone.…

Here's the narrative you're going to hear about Tesla Motors, the Silicon Valley electric-car company which is prepping layoffs and replacing its CEO: The company's founding investor sweeps in to save the day. It is true that Elon Musk, the company's main financial backer, is stepping in to replace CEO Ze'ev Drori,…

Sure, Leonid Brezhnev's particular flavor of state capitalism and political repression was no pleasure to live under. But consider this, free-market apologists: Those wily Soviets and their evil regulated markets out-innovated us in the space department to claim first-mover status. It wasn't for another fifty years…

Preeminent among the magazine world's kingmaking power lists is Vanity Fair's New Establishment, which appears in the October issue — on newsstands in L.A. and New York today, but not in the Bay Area for another six days. Silicon Valley gets similar short shrift: The names who make it there are predictable bigs like…

21-year-old billionaires in the making? To tell the truth, the youngest Forbes has come up with in the past decade was Elon Musk at 27. That was back in 1998, with only $22 million. Musk's face is more lined, but he still isn't a billionaire, even after cashing out from PayPal's sale to eBay. Forbes at least has…

Peter Thiel fought viciously with Elon Musk in the early part of this decade; after they merged their companies to form with PayPal, they wrestled for control, with Thiel emerging victorious as the CEO who led the company through an IPO and a $1.5 billion sale to eBay. At the time, Musk was the richer, having sold a…

On Omelek Island in the Pacific Ocean, 2,500 miles from Hawaii, a rocket carrying the ashen remains of Star Trek actor James “Scotty” Doohan and 207 other people was poised to rocket to the heavenes Saturday. Footing the bill: Elon Musk of PayPal and Tesla Motors fame. Instead, the tech entrepreneur, now dabbling in…