When JB Straubel sat down to lunch with Elon Musk in 2003, his opening pitch flopped. According to Fortune, the then-27-year-old Stanford engineer proposed an unmanned, hydrogen-powered airplane, and Musk showed no interest. Straubel pivoted to a side project: an electric sports car built from lithium-ion laptop cells. That idea landed, and Musk wrote a check.
Straubel joined Tesla in 2004, becoming one of its earliest employees and, from 2005, its chief technology officer. He is credited with designing the battery pack for the original Roadster — which used nearly 7,000 cells to deliver a 244-mile range — and with helping shape Tesla's battery manufacturing, its Supercharger network and its first Gigafactory. He served as CTO until July 2019, then stayed on as a senior adviser, per Wikipedia. In May 2023, Tesla shareholders elected him to the company's board, TechCrunch reported.
The "$1.3 trillion success" refers to Tesla itself. Fortune describes the carmaker as a "$1.3 trillion juggernaut" today — a reference to its market capitalization, not to Straubel personally. Tesla nearly went bankrupt in its early years; Straubel has said it had roughly a 10% chance of succeeding.
The next bottleneck
Straubel's current focus is Redwood Materials, which he founded in 2017 while still at Tesla. The company, headquartered in Carson City, Nevada, recycles lithium-ion batteries to recover critical materials, then refines them into components for new batteries, according to Wikipedia.
Why that matters: every electric vehicle and grid battery depends on metals such as lithium, nickel, cobalt and copper. Most are mined and refined far from where batteries are built, leaving automakers exposed to long, concentrated and often geopolitically sensitive supply chains. Recycling aims to recover those metals from spent batteries and manufacturing scrap and feed them back into production, reducing the need for fresh mining and shortening the loop between old batteries and new ones.
The company has drawn substantial capital. Fortune reports it has raised more than $2.3 billion in venture funding, with investors including Google and Microsoft, plus a $2 billion conditional U.S. Department of Energy loan awarded in 2023. In October 2025, Redwood raised a $350 million round led by Eclipse and Nvidia's venture arm, NVentures, valuing it at more than $6 billion, Bloomberg and Electrek reported. Its partners include Volkswagen, Volvo, Toyota and BMW.
That new funding also reflects a second line of business. Through Redwood Energy, the company repurposes new and used EV battery packs into stationary energy-storage systems aimed at AI data centers, industrial sites and grid stabilization, Electrek noted. Straubel's wager is that the materials feeding the battery economy — and the batteries themselves once they age out of cars — are worth as much attention as the vehicles he once helped design.
