I recently learned that Elon Musk wasn't actually the founder of Tesla, but rather an early investor. This article borders on the same theme; there's more than meets the eye to the faces of today's most innovative technologies. It is alarming to see how often proper accreditation is being misattributed/stolen in our industry.
Generally, I agree with your sentiment regard proper accreditation in the media, but claiming that Thrun doesn't deserve a huge chunk of credit for self-driving cars at Google is thoroughly unsupported by the evidence (check out the history of the DARPA challenges). This article seems to be grasping at a sinister story of a coverup that simply doesn't exist.
From the article: "From then on, we started doing a lot of work with Google," says Majusiak. "We did almost all of their hardware integration. They were just doing software."
Just software? Holy cow. The machine learning, control systems, mapping software, and all the other algorithms in a self-driving car are the really fundamental pieces. It's super important to get the hardware right, and 510 did a great job of that, but the software is the brain.
Technically, I don't think Musk was the founder of Paypal either. I think he founded x.com, which merged with Confinity (the company founded by Max Levchin and Peter Thiel - who had started PayPal).
I was quite surprised by the parent comment because I had never heard of Musk being described as a founder. But then again I've lived in palo alto since before tesla was founded so the power struggle was minor gossip at the time (and was in the mercury news).
What has surprised me is that he is in fact listed as a founder on the wikipedia web site and in fact Tesla litigated over the matter.
Now the word "founder" is weird -- IME A round paperwork typically refers to any common shareholder at the time of venture investment as a "founder". And then there was that bizarre Facebook suit over who could refer to themselves as a company founder. Weird.
"Founder" title drama is mostly around successful companies in my experience. Basically some additional mojo can be had a funding discussions if you can legitimately claim to be a 'founder' of some previous success (the bigger the better). Especially in social settings it is strange (and to my twisted humor funny) when people will say they 'worked' at one company and 'founded' another company when they had the exact same role in each company at the same level of development and differ only in the perception of 'success' or 'not success'.
After reading the article on how primates use 'fame' in dominance games that made the rounds here I found that it identified that sort of behavior pretty precisely.
