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WILKES-BARRE – The first time Martin Eberhard made a risky business decision, he was a recent college graduate in debt. To land a job with a small startup company, he had to invest in the firm.

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Martin Eberhard, co-founder and former CEO of Tesla Motors, with Wilkes students Wednesday at the Henry Student Center.

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When the firm started trading publicly, he bought a house.

For his next risky decision, Eberhard left that job to start an e-book firm. For nearly a year, he didn’t take a salary and sold a car to get by. When that firm went public, he bought a bigger house.

Now, Eberhard drives a $100,000 high-performance electric sports car he designed and built. And he travels around to talk about how he went from simply wanting to buy an energy-efficient speedster to making the car and selling it to rich people – George Clooney has one – who want to feel “morally superior.”

Eberhard has made a career out of increasingly risky financial balancing acts. .He stopped by Wilkes University on Wednesday to bestow some of that experience on budding business students.

His success has been dismissed as a series of lucky breaks, he said, but, “It’s the third time, so I get some credit. … I arrange to be lucky.”

And he has come out basically unscathed, except for once. Having built his Tesla electric vehicle firm from scratch, he wanted to enjoy the limelight for a while. But he was forced out by an investor, a situation he marks as one of his greatest failures with the company.

He said he was angry about that, but he later acknowledged that he’s come to terms with the situation.

“If I start another car company … I’m not going to make another Tesla. I don’t need to. Tesla proved its point.”

That point being that high-performance and energy-efficient aren’t mutually exclusive in the sports-car world. And that buying a green car no longer is about saving money in the long run.

“There’s hardly any car that’s an investment. But it’s a statement,” he said.

His entrepreneurial advice: When raising capital, don’t sell any more of a company than necessary, but if offered a little extra, take it “because running out of money sucks.”