Tesla Investor Relations Material

Tesla is a leading electric vehicle manufacturer with a mission to accelerate the advent of sustainable transports. Their first electric vehicle model was the Tesla Roadster, which was revolutionary in terms of the unmatched driving range. Today, Tesla produces five models: Model S, Model X, Model 3, Model Y, and the Cybertruck. Tesla has many initiatives beside the cars such as full self-driving software and production of batteries.

Contrary to popular belief, Tesla was not initially started by Elon Musk but by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Instead, Elon Musk was one of the early investors and participated in the Series A funding round. He thereby became the largest owner and the Chairman of the board until he eventually stepped in as the CEO in 2008. Elon Musk had previously founded x.com, which later merged with Confinity to become what today is known as PayPal. The capital that Musk received when eBay acquired PayPal in 2002 was used to fund Tesla together with his other ventures at the time, SpaceX and SolarCity.

Elon Musk is one of the wealthiest persons in the world given the extraordinary rise of Tesla’s market capitalization during the last decade. As of 2023, Tesla is one of the most valuable companies in the world together with other prominent businesses such as Amazon, Meta, Berkshire Hathaway, and NVIDIA to name a few.

Besides being a global leader for electrical vehicles, Tesla is also a pioneer when it comes to full self-driving software and several other areas such as development of AI-based robots and space exploration. The use case for the Tesla bot, according to Musk, could be to pick up groceries and help out with other day-to-day repetitive tasks. As for the space exploration initiatives; Tesla attached the Tesla Roadster as payload on the Falcon Heavy test flight in 2018 that was sent out into space, which in hindsight can be viewed as a brilliant branding and marketing campaign.

Since Tesla was one of the first companies to mass-produce electric vehicles, there initially was not any charging infrastructure in place. Tesla therefore had to build it on their own which resulted in the Supercharger network. At first, it was free and unlimited for all Tesla owners, but now it is only discontinued. In 2021, Tesla announced that they were looking at possibilities for all electric vehicle owners to use their charging infrastructure, which previously was exclusive to Tesla owners only. As of March 2022, the Supercharger network consisted of more than 30,000 Supercharges at more than 2,500+ locations globally.