Tesla started as a two-man startup building sports cars in a dealership
Tesla's first cars were assembled in 2008 in the service bays of an old Chevrolet dealership in Menlo Park. By January 2009 only 147 had been delivered. Within twelve years the company was worth more than the next nine biggest carmakers put together.
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning incorporated Tesla Motors on 1 July 2003, naming it after the inventor Nikola Tesla. Eberhard pictured a carmaker that was really a technology firm built around batteries, software and its own motor. Elon Musk, flush from selling his PayPal stake, put in $6.5 million of a $7.5 million first round in 2004 and became chairman. After a 2009 lawsuit settlement, five people may call themselves co-founders, Musk, Ian Wright and J. B. Straubel among them. A board led by Musk asked Eberhard to stand down as chief executive in 2007, and Musk took the post himself in October 2008.
The plan was to begin with a premium sports car for early adopters and work down to cheaper models. The Roadster came first; a $465 million Energy Department loan, later repaid, helped fund the Model S. In 2010 Tesla bought the former NUMMI factory in Fremont from Toyota for $42 million and floated on the stock market, the first American carmaker to do so since Ford in 1956. The Model S became the first electric car to top a national monthly sales chart, in Norway in 2013.
The Model 3, unveiled in 2016, drew more than 325,000 paid reservations in a week, but heavy automation slowed the line and the company endured what it called production hell. It came through, and the car was the world's best-selling electric model from 2018 to 2021. Musk's 2018 post about taking Tesla private led to a $20 million SEC fine and the loss of his chairmanship.
Four profitable quarters in a row earned a place in the S&P 500 in December 2020, and factories followed in Shanghai, Berlin and Texas. Along the way Tesla has drawn lawsuits, dozens of recalls and criticism over worker treatment and driver-assist promises, and by the end of 2025 it was no longer the world's biggest electric vehicle maker.
Source: Tesla, Inc.
