According to Online Domain, Elon Musk, Tesla’s co-founder and CEO, has finally disclosed the purchase price of the Tesla.com domain name. He paid $11 million for the name in February 2016.
Musk did not name the previous Tesla.com owner, but most likely it was Stu Grossman, a Silicon Valley engineer and Nikola Tesla fan. Grossman had owned Tesla.com since 1992, and the domain name was not used until 2016, when Tesla.com was handed over to Elon Musk.
Musk said on Twitter that it had taken him over 10 years, $11 million and unimaginable effort to purchase the Tesla.com name. In another tweet, Musk wrote that he “bought [the] trademark off Brad Siewert for $75k in late 2004. <…> Our alternative name was Faraday…”
It was reported earlier that after obtaining Tesla.com, Musk could at last change his company’s name to Tesla. Before that, Musk had to use the Teslamotors.com address for his company, which was extremely inconvenient, first of all because of the much broader scope of its business activity. The problem was solved in 2016.
