The journey of Martin Forest Eberhard (co-founder of Tesla) live on Migrating Occult

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:01]University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

[00:00:11]>> [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [music] [applause] >> Please be seated.

[00:01:29]Distinguished guests, distinguished faculty, honored friends and family, good morning and welcome.

[00:01:37]My name is Daniel Bodony, a professor of aerospace engineering and associate dean for research and graduate programs. It is my privilege to welcome you to this graduation ceremony of the Grainger College of Engineering.

[00:01:50]To the parents, family, and friends of our graduates, we are delighted that you have all taken the time to be with us today to celebrate this milestone in the life of your special graduate and to help us recognize their achievement.

[00:02:05]Candidates, we welcome you.

[00:02:08]Congratulations.

[00:02:09]Well done.

[00:02:12]>> [applause and cheering] >> Today is a pivotal pivotal day in your life. You will receive the degree that each of you has earned from the Grainger College of Engineering.

[00:02:28]You will join a large, supportive, and impactful group of the nearly 120,000 alumni who shared the experience of studying here in Urbana-Champaign, in Chicago, or online.

[00:02:39]Learning, researching, and growing alongside the best students, staff, and faculty in the world. You worked hard and long to reach this point, and you did that work in many settings, in large classes, small project teams, online and in person, as well as in labs, study groups, and research groups. I know that it is sometimes difficult to appreciate how far you have come during the day-to-day of classes, studying, homework, and exams, and potentially through your research and teaching.

[00:03:13]Today, as you stand on the precipice of a new chapter in your lives, remember the lessons you've learned, the challenges that you've overcome, and the resilience that resides within each of you. Again, congratulations.

[00:03:29]>> [applause] >> Let me be among many to assure you that each of you has a lot to be proud of, and I hope that soon you periodically will take the time to reflect on how much you have grown and accomplished during your time at Illinois.

[00:03:50]In a few minutes, we will again applaud you for those accomplishments.

[00:03:54]Before we do so, I think it is important to recognize that you did not get here alone.

[00:04:00]You also enjoyed the support of your parents and families, your loved ones, and your friends. I invite you to take a moment now and thank them for their support with a round of your own applause.

[00:04:18]>> [applause] >> Let me now continue with the long arc of events to our keynote speaker.

[00:04:27]We are thrilled to welcome Martin Eberhard back to campus as our guest speaker.

[00:04:32]Martin Eberhard is an engineer, entrepreneur, and inventor with more than 30 granted patents. He earned a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1982 and a master's degree in electrical engineering in 1984.

[00:04:48]In 2015, he was inducted into the Grainger College of Engineering Hall of Fame, and he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

[00:04:56]Martin Eberhard and his friend Marc Tarpenning Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors in 2002, where Eberhard was its original chairman and was CEO until late 2007.

[00:05:08]Eberhard and his team envisioned the Tesla motor battery system, a lighter, more durable system that provided unrivaled acceleration and energy storage, transforming the public perception of EVs.

[00:05:21]Prior to Tesla, Eberhard and Tarpenning together founded which created the market for electronic books with the 1998 launch of the Rocket eBook, providing for the first time the necessary infrastructure to sell and deliver electronic content securely on the internet.

[00:05:39]Before leaving Tesla, Eberhard was an entrepreneur in residence at the Mayfield Fund, a director of EV development at Volkswagen, CTO and chairman of Envia Systems, and an EV battery and chassis company, and chief science officer of SF Motors.

[00:05:56]Eberhard continues to advise various startups and large corporations, and he lectures around the world on reducing the use of carbon fuels, the advantages of electric drive, and entrepreneurship.

[00:06:08]Please join me in welcoming Eberhard Feber.

[00:06:12]>> [applause] [applause] >> Good morning.

[00:06:23]I'm not going to give you a lot of advice because I know the world today is very different than when I when I left this university in 1984.

[00:06:30]You'll find your own way, and hopefully what you learn at the University of Illinois will help you thrive.

[00:06:36]Maybe something in my story will inspire you, too.

[00:06:39]So, here's my story in 5 minutes or less.

[00:06:42]There's a lot more about me on the internet, but I'm sure you don't want to believe everything you read there.

[00:06:48]I graduated from this university with a BS in computer engineering in 1982, when computer engineering was a new major here.

[00:06:55]My master's thesis a year and a half later was focused on embedded control systems.

[00:07:00]I chose this field only because I thought the technology was pretty cool.

[00:07:03]But when I went looking for a job, the companies that were the most interested in hiring me were all in the defense industry, which is not where I wanted to go.

[00:07:12]Instead, I took a much lower paying job in a Silicon Valley company that was making video displays for computers.

[00:07:19]I took the job mainly because I liked the vibe and the people who worked there. It's hard to imagine today, but back then I did not know what a startup company was, and I had no idea what pre-public stock options were.

[00:07:31]It was the startup vibe that I was instinctively attracted to.

[00:07:35]I learned a lot there, mainly the difference between a working prototype and a product that's ready for mass production, and actually what does mass production mean?

[00:07:44]I also learned what a startup was and definitely what a stock was all about.

[00:07:49]As I note, that was a company that was also started by a University of Illinois grad.

[00:07:54]A few years later, I left to join a team left to join a team that was starting a company in Iris Graphics, a networking where I was the only electrical engineer on the team.

[00:08:04]We It took us a half a year to get funding for that company and my finances got kind of tight, but oddly.

[00:08:11]It worked out though. The company went public again eventually and I did okay.

[00:08:16]I spent a few years after that doing freelance chip design for disk drive companies, which was educational but crushingly boring.

[00:08:25]Yeah, so the best thing about that experience was me and my friend Martin Eberhard, with whom I would go on to start two companies as I mentioned. Our first company was arguably where we arguably invented the e-books. Along the way, I had to learn about the intricacies of the publishing industry, which was still trapped in the 19th century.

[00:08:41]Both in terms of their technology and their business models. The most difficult problem there turned out to be not technology, but figuring out how to work with publishers, and authors, and agents, and others in this antiquated industry.

[00:08:53]We liked it for the opportunity to sell that company in 2000, just before Silicon Valley went into one of its downturns.

[00:09:00]From there, we both worked as mercenaries for a while at a company that was designing chips and firmware to optimize high-speed networking.

[00:09:07]Boring again.

[00:09:09]We left that company to start Tesla.

[00:09:12]Starting the EV revolution at a time when everyone knew just two things about EVs. One, they sucked, and two, they're dead.

[00:09:20]>> [laughter] >> Yes, we did we did deploy some cool technology that had never been in an EV before, such as lithium-ion batteries and digitally controlled AC induction motors.

[00:09:31]But But we were able to to do this only because we approached the market in a totally different way from anyone before us.

[00:09:38]Early on I recognized that all past EV companies had tried to start with a low-cost car that everyone could afford.

[00:09:45]In their effort to make the first car affordable, these previous companies all built commodity cars that nobody wanted to drive.

[00:09:52]I realized that new technology and rarely start out cheaper. I proposed doing it very differently.

[00:09:58]I proposed starting out making an EV that showed off the strength of the electric drive train, outperform even the best gas cars of the time.

[00:10:06]Our first car, the Tesla Roadster, was a high-performance, long-range sports car that was expensive, but it was fast, sexy, and very fun.

[00:10:17]It was exactly the opposite of what everyone imagined an EV to be, and it worked. We totally changed the way car buyers and the legacy car companies thought about EVs, and the revolution continues today.

[00:10:30]I did eventually get pushed out of my own company by some rich dude with a pretty big ego.

[00:10:35]But that's >> [laughter] >> that's a lesson for I'm still learning and a story for another day.

[00:10:42]Now, so Somewhere along the way I managed to overcome what had been crippling stage fright for most of my life.

[00:10:56]And much to my own amazement, I've come to rather enjoy speaking publicly about things that matter to me: EVs, climate change, energy, and entrepreneurship.

[00:11:04]So, control systems, computer graphics, network engineering, chip design, cryptography, publishing industry, high-volume manufacturing, automotive electric drive trains, battery management, marketing and selling cars, branding, public speaking, stocks, boards of directors, managing companies, and managing investors.

[00:11:22]What ties all these together is a growing interest in solving real problems, an unwillingness to be categorized, and a willingness to challenge assumptions about whether the way think are always done.

[00:11:33]Okay, so here's my one bit of advice for you.

[00:11:36]Don't let yourself get stuffed into a box.

[00:11:39]The degree you've just earned is only a starting point. It does not define you.

[00:11:44]You are not merely an engineer. You are someone who has learned to do engineering among your many talents.

[00:11:50]The most important thing you learn here is not the particular bits of engineering that you study here, though those are important to get you started.

[00:11:58]The most important thing you've learned here is how to learn and the confidence to solve tough problems.

[00:12:04]Never be afraid of diving in, learning a new field, [clears throat] and tackling complex problems, whether they're engineering problems or otherwise.

[00:12:12]So, thank you very much and good luck to everyone of you.

[00:12:18]>> [applause] [applause] >> Thank you, Martin, for your words, your contribution to your field, and for exemplifying what it truly means to be a great engineer.

[00:12:37]A long