Tesla History: Founders, Elon Musk, & Facts | When and How It Started, Timeline

Written by Rayden Sam Posted on 2024-01-19

Tesla, Inc. is a transnational American vehicle and clean energy corporation with its headquarters in Austin, Texas. Inventor and electrical engineer Nikola Tesla is honoured by the company’s name.

Tesla-Introduction: Tesla creates and manufactures solar panels, solar roof tiles, electric vehicles, and other associated goods and services. With a market value of more than US$760 billion, Tesla is one of the most valuable companies in the world and continues to be the most valuable automobile.

The business creates and installs a significant amount of photovoltaic systems in the US through its subsidiary Tesla Energy.

Tesla-History

On July 1, 2003, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning formally established the business as Tesla Motors, Inc. Tarpenning held the position of CFO, and Eberhard was the CEO.

A few months later, Tesla hired its third employee, Ian Wright. Elon Musk, who had gained $100 million from the sale of his stake in PayPal two years prior, contributed $6.5 million of the $7.5 million series A capital that the business got in February 2004.

Musk rose to the position of chairman of the board of directors and emerged as Tesla’s largest shareholder. All five of the individuals – Eberhard, Tarpenning, Wright, Musk, and Straubel – are now able to use the title “co-founder” because of a litigation settlement reached by Eberhard and Tesla in September 2009.

Tesla-Global Expansion

In Shanghai, China, Tesla opened its first “Gigafactory” outside of the US in 2019. Built in less than six months, Giga Shanghai was the first automobile factory in China that a foreign corporation entirely owned.

The next year, Tesla also began building two other Gigafactories: one in Texas, United States, and one close to Berlin, Germany. Deliveries of Tesla’s fifth car model, the crossover Model Y, started in March 2020.

Tesla-Financial performance of Tesla

Tesla stated that their net income for the fiscal (and calendar) year 2021 was $5.52 billion. The annual revenue increased by 71 percent from the prior fiscal year to $53.8 billion.

$314 million of the total revenue in 2021 comes from the sale of regulatory credits to other manufacturers in order to meet government pollution standards.

For numerous quarters, that amount has been a lower proportion of income. Tesla sold $679 million in legal carbon credits in the first quarter of 2022.

Tesla had $17.6 billion in cash on hand at the end of 2021, a $1.8 billion decrease from the end of 2020.

Tesla-Partnership with Panasonic

Tesla and Panasonic, a manufacturer of battery cells, declared in January 2010 that they would collaborate to create nickel-based lithium-ion battery cells for electric vehicles.

The collaboration was a part of Panasonic’s $1 billion investment over three years in facilities for the development, manufacturing, and research of lithium-ion cells.