JB Straubel

Tesla CTO and co-founder JB Straubel has sold about ~$3 million worth in TSLA shares after exercising a bunch of options. We’ve also learned that his presence around the Palo Alto office has been ‘scarce’ over the past 6-8 months or so.
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We have been reporting on a ton of new Tesla Energy projects being deployed lately and they have been adding up to quite an important energy capacity.

Tesla CTO JB Straubel now confirms that the company has deployed over 1 GWh of energy storage – a capacity that he says is “undeniably making an impact.”
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What is Tesla’s core technology advantage over competitors? Does it even have one? Those are questions that often come up when discussing Tesla’s lead in the electric vehicle sector. Since Tesla open-sourced its patents, some suggested that its technology advantage is virtually nonexistent since competitors could simply use it, but it’s not as simple.

While Tesla’s patents are indeed opened for use in electric vehicles as per its ‘patent pledge’, Tesla is still keeping some trade secrets and the company is fairly secretive about some of its development and manufacturing processes, especially when it comes to batteries, which could very well be Tesla’s core technology advantage led by its co-founder and CTO, JB Straubel.
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Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel said in the past that he probably “likes batteries more than he likes cars”, but it looks like his interest in batteries extend to other forms of energy storage. He showed his continued interest in the technology today by securing an investment in a new energy storage startup called ‘Axiom Exergy’, according to the company.
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When Tesla first announced that it submitted an acquisition offer to SolarCity‘s board of director, the company made it clear that Elon Musk and Antonio Gracias will recuse themselves from voting on the $2.8 billion merger deal since they both sit on the boards of both companies.

Now we learn that two more SolarCity board members will be recusing themselves from the vote after it was determined that they didn’t “meet the requirements for independence”.

The two SolarCity directors are JB Straubel, best known for being co-founder and CTO of Tesla, and Peter Rive, SolarCity co-founder and CTO, but also cousin to Elon Musk.
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In a documentary about the Stanford Solar Car Project, Stanford University’s team participating in the World Solar Challenge, Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel describes the team has a “key thing” during the early days of Tesla Motors as he recruited his friends from the team to start the company.
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After Tesla CEO Elon Musk exercised over $100 million worth of options on two separate occasions ahead of the earnings last week, now it’s Chief Technology Officer and co-founder JB Straubel’s turn to exercise some options and increase his stake in the automaker.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk and CTO JB Straubel were in Korea this week and they attended the Energy Korea Forum 2015. Local South Korean news reported on comments made by Straubel during a Q&A session at the forum, the CTO said that Tesla is “committed” to the South Korean market and that he sees a “great potential” there. Although he didn’t offer a concrete timeline on when the company plans to start selling cars in the country.
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Following last week’s announcement to invest $1 million in battery research with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Tesla Motors opened its Gigafactory internship program for applications while visiting the University of Nevada, Reno earlier this week.
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Earlier today Forbes released its updated list of most influential young people in business – 40 Under 40 – and Tesla’s Chief Technology Officer and co-founder JB Straubel (39) took the second position.

The CTO is only outdone (according to Forbes) by Adam Neumann, the co-founder and CEO of WeWork, a provider of shared workspace and services to entrepreneurs and startups.

In his short profile, Forbes credits Straubel for being the person who convinced Elon Musk to invest in Tesla. 
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In a blog post published yesterday, Tesla CTO JB Straubel addresses Model S acceleration and horsepower concerns recently expressed by Tesla owners and car publications. Some have suspected and even accused Tesla of misrepresenting the power output of the Model S for a while, and now Straubel explains the logic behind Tesla’s horsepower and performance calculations…
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Steve Jurvetson, Tesla board member, and JB Straubel, Tesla’s CTO during a tour of the Gigafactory under-construction in Nevada – photo from Steve Jurvetson

Yesterday, Tesla’s CTO JB Straubel made interesting remarks about the future of transportation and energy storage during a keynote presentation at InterSolar, a major solar conference in San Francisco.
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Out of the 5 founding members of Tesla motors, only two remain with the company; of course the now famous Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, Chairman and Product Architect, and JB Straubel, Tesla’s Chief Technology Officer. But the three expatriates; Marc Tarpenning, Martin Eberhard and Ian Wright, were instrumental to the founding of Tesla and although they left the car company, some in better terms than others, it is interesting to learn about what they are doing now. Unsurprisingly, most of them are still in the EV business.

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Great interview, not much new however if you follow Tesla and its CTO into the energy industry. Some interesting bits:

Why did Tesla act differently? For a start, it does not think of itself as a carmaker. “I see us more as an energy-innovation company,” says Jeffrey “JB” Straubel, the firm’s chief technology officer, and one of the co-founders of Tesla, along with Elon Musk, the chief executive. “If we can reduce energy-storage prices, it’s the most important thing we can do to make electric vehicles more prevalent,” says Mr Straubel. “Add in renewable power and I have a direct line of sight towards an entire economy that doesn’t need fossil fuels and doesn’t need to pay more to do it.”…

Mr Straubel met Mr Musk, a freshly minted multimillionaire from the sale of his PayPal digital-payments company to eBay. “One lunch was the beginning of what eventually became Tesla,” says Mr Straubel. “We spent most of the meal talking about electric aeroplanes. But as we were wrapping up, I said I was working on a fun crazy project with cars, trying to build a lithium-ion battery pack that could last 1,000 miles.”…

“Most other companies do not believe that battery volume will grow as fast as it’s going to,” Mr Straubel counters. “They don’t understand the tight linkage between cost and volume. We’re at this crossing-point where a small reduction in cost is going to result in a ridiculously big increase in volume, because the auto industry is so big.”…

“No one wishes we could come up with a technology that makes today’s chemistry obsolete more than me,” says Mr Straubel. “We could sell more cars at a lower price. But we’re not waiting.”