It took longer Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) to obtain the right to use the domain name of the Tesla.com website that you took to design, build and sell your first car.
What happened with Tesla: Tesla CEO Elon Musk recounted the story earlier this year on the third-row Tesla podcast of how it took approximately a decade for Silicon Valley engineer Stuart Grossman to sell the rights to Tesla.com.
The company had been using TeslaMotors.com, but Musk has always seen it as more than just a car company and wanted the basic domain name.
“It took us 10 years to buy that domain from Tesla.com,” Musk said on the podcast. “That cost us about $ 10 million.”
Musk said in 2018 on Twitter that it actually cost $ 11 million, and it took an “incredible effort” to get Grossman’s domain name out.
Buying https://t.co/46TXqRrsdr took over a decade, $ 11M and an incredible amount of effort. I didn’t like https://t.co/BsRfMrY9Gm even when we were just doing.
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2018
Grossman said in an interview three years ago, after news was released that Tesla finally bought the domain name, that he had not been using the domain at all, and that it was more troublesome than it was worth keeping.
“It was becoming a burden,” Grossman said in the 2016 interview. “Despite being isolated by my registrar’s privacy scheme, people were still tracking me.”
Tesla tracked it, too, and has since owned the Tesla.com domain.
More Tesla Name Trivia: Musk and company also had to buy the brand for the Tesla name. They bought it from Brad Siewert in 2004 for $ 75,000. If they couldn’t get it, they had planned to use an alternate name for the company, Faraday.
This article was originally published on January 27, 2020.
Photo courtesy: Steve Jurvetson on Flickr.
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