Methods of Prosperity 34 
TL;DR

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning founded Tesla Motors in 2003. They needed to raise $7,000,000 for a prototype of the Roadster from a leading investor. That investor would be Elon Musk. He’d already started working on a similar project with JB Straubel. The EP1 Roadster helped attract $40 million for Tesla Motors’ Series C round in May 2006. By 2007, the Roadster hadn’t shipped to customers yet. At the same time, Elon was trying to get SpaceX off the ground (pun intended). The third Falcon 1 launch failed in September 2008. If the fourth launch failed, that could be the end of SpaceX. In 2008, the economy worsened from the subprime lending fallout. Elon was afraid either SpaceX or Tesla was going to run out of funding.