Stock info Tesla | Filter  Basic-Info

Introduction

Tesla is an American company and resided in Palo Alto, California. The company sales in electric vehicles and clean energy. The company's current products include a wide variation of products, such as , , , , and many others. Tesla is one of the leading companies for the best-selling plug-in and electric passenger automaker. It holds a market share of 16% for the plug-in segment and 23% for the battery-electric element per 2020 sales.

Tesla is the most significant installer of solar photovoltaic systems in the united states, which the organization does through one of its subsidiaries, SolarCity. It also has the privilege of being the major global supplier of battery energy storage systems and has provided about 3 GWh of battery storage. It has also introduced many battery storage plants worldwide.

History

Tesla Motors began in July 2003. The name of the company after Nikola Tesla, an inventor and an electrical engineer. Since 2008, Elon Musk continued as the company's CEO. Starting a company was to promote sustainable transport and energy through electric vehicles and solar power.

Controversies in Tesla

Tesla has continued under many arguments and has faced several lawsuits due to its CEO Elon Musk's statements and actions. The company has suffered severe violations of their workers' rights, whistle-blower retaliation, and unresolved and hazardous technical issues with their products.

The company's products

CEO Musk performed an active part in the production of Tesla's very first product, the Roadster. He did a comprehensive study of the development, specifically keeping in view the composition of the product. He assumed that Tesla's long-term strategic target was to produce accessible mass-market electric vehicles from the first day. Tesla's goal was to initiate a luxurious sports car concentrating on early adopters and then going into more mainstream vehicles, including sedans and other affordable ones.

Tesla assembled its first car model, the Roadster, in 2009. The company was having a series of other model cars such as the Model S sedan in 2012, another Model X SUV in 2015, the considerable volume Model 3 sedan in 2017 (an all-best-selling plug-in car) Y crossover in 2020. The company's global exchanges were 499,550 units in 2020, which increased 35.8 % from the previous year. The company also passed the one million mark of the generation of electric cars.

Series B Introduced by Tesla

The Series B of Tesla, launched in February 2006, was also led by Musk. An expense of 13 million, which included Valor Equity Partners to the funding team. He also co-led another purchase of $40 million round in May 2006. The leading entrepreneurs, including Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and former eBay President Jeff Skoll, also spent in this round. In May 2007, the next game worth $45 million took the total private funding investment to over $105 million. The Roadster prototypes were formally announced on July 19, 2006, in Santa Monica, California, with a solicitation of only 350 persons.

Board of Directors of Tesla

The board of directors in 2007 urged Eberhard to resign from his CEO post, which took the title of "President of Technology" before eventually leaving the company in January 2008. The Co-founder Marc Tarpenning, who also worked as a vice president of the company's Electrical Engineering also omitted the company in January 2008.

In August 2007, Michael Marks converted interim CEO, and in December 2007, Drori became CEO and President. Musk chose Drori as CEO in October 2008.

Capitalization and Income of Tesla

Tesla's generation of the Roadster originated in 2008. Tesla was able to establish US$187 million by January 2009 and produced 147 cars. Musk made an addition of about US$70 from his own money. In June 2009, the US Department of Energy allowed Tesla to receive US$465 million in interest-bearing loans. The capital of the US$8 billion Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program funded the production of the Model S sedan, engineering as well as the development of commercial powertrain technology.

Tesla requited the loan in May 2013 with a US$12 million interest. Tesla also bought a territory that later became Tesla Factory in Fremont, California, for $42 million. It was initiated in October 2010 for Model S. The next month; Tesla Motors also originated its initial public offering (IPO) on NASDAQ. It was recognized as the first American car company to do so after the Ford Motor Company, which had its IPO in 1956. The company issued 13.3 million shares of common stock for US$17.00 per share, thereby raising US$226 million Tesla ended the further manufacturing of Roadster in January 2012 and launched its the second car in June in the same year, the Model S luxury sedan. The car was a remarkable success, and it gained the company many awards in the year 2012 and 213, including the 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year. The car graced the first electric car to reach the top in sales ranking of a country, precisely when it got the first position in the Norwegian new car sales list in September 2013. It was also the best-selling plug-in electric car for the years 2015 and 2016. In 2014, the Autopilot, a driver support system, was also announced by Tesla.

Even in the same year, Tesla exported Sensors and software to start their new car features, which would later be called "hardware version 1" or "HW1". In April 2015, the company also entered the energy storage market, revealing its Powerwall home and Powerpack industrial battery packs. It gained a very positive response by receiving orders priced at $800 million within a week of the unveiling. The third vehicle, the luxury SUV Model X, originated in September 2015 when the company was selling over 10,000 cars per quarter.

Model 3 (2016–2018) and SolarCity by Tesla

In November 2016, the company originated its product, the SolarCity, thereby entering the solar photovoltaics market. After a few months, the company changed its name to Tesla for a better reflection of its extensive business scope, which introduced electric vehicles, stationary energy storage systems, and solar power generation.

Tesla also started its philanthropic work by contributing solar power to the territories recovering from disasters in 2017, notably establishing a solar plus storage system for restoring electricity at a hospital in Puerto Rico, Hurricane Maria. The company also granted $37.5 million to K-12 STEM education in Nevada. Tesla provided 5 million Yuan ($723,000) to the Chinese CDC amidst the COVID-19 outbreak to cope with the disease in January 2020. The sale of its fourth model vehicle, Model 3 Sedan, was launched in July 2017. It was an approximately cheaper vehicle from the previous ones and produced for the mass market. The car was highly predictable, and there were already Four hundred fifty-five thousand reservations for the Model 3 before its launch. The car's unveiling was dented by delays and other problems, which put more pressure on the company, one of the shorted companies in the market. The CEO, Elon Musk, thought of privatizing Tesla but did not materialize his plan. His statement grew much controversial, and many lawsuits got opened against the company.

Global expansion

Currently, the company has extended its production capacity in many parts of the world. In 2019, Tesla opened its first Gigafactory outside the US., in Shanghai, China. The Giga Shanghai was known as the first automobile factory in China entirely owned by a foreign company and built in less than six months. Another Gigafactory followed it in Berlin, Germany, and in Texas, US. In March 2020, Tesla started deliveries of its fifth vehicle model, the Model Y crossover. The company became the most valuable automaker ever on January 10, 2020, with a $86 billion market share. The market capitalization of Tesla crossed the other automakers on June 10, 2020, from those of BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen combined. The next month, Tesla achieved a market capitalization of $206 billion, crossing Toyota's $202 billion, and became the world's top car manufacturer by market capitalization.

From July 2019 to June 2020, four consecutive profitable quarters were reported by Tesla for the first time, making it eligible for inclusion. The company's addition to the index took place in the same year on December 21. It was the largest company ever built and was the sixth-largest in the index.

On October 6, 2020, it was told by Tesla to Electrek that the company's PR department dissolved (except few PR managers representing Tesla's European and Asian markets), becoming the first car manufacturer to do so.

The company accomplished its goal of manufacturing half-million cars in 2020. The company ended the year with over US$19 billion of cash compared to US$6.3 billion at the end of 2019. In February 2021, it revealed that Tesla had invested an amount of US$1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, and the company gave an indication that it would accept Bitcoin as a form of payment in the future.

Board of directors of Tesla

In April 2017, a public letter was declared to Tesla by a group of dominant Tesla investors. It also holds the California State Teachers' Retirement System, asking Tesla For the addition of two new directors to its board "who do not have any nods with chief executive Elon Musk." The investors further penned that "five of six non-executive directors have acknowledged relation to Mr. Musk that could endangered their ability to implement the unallied judgment.” At the time, Tesla's directors involved Brad Buss, who served as a chief financial officer at SolarCity; a venture capitalist who also remains on the board of SpaceX; Elon Musk's brother, Kimbal; and Ira Ehrenpreis and Antonio Gracias, both of whom also spent in SpaceX. The letter also claimed for an independent board that could keep a check on groupthink. The letter requested for a more independent board that could put a review on groupthink.

The early answer of Musk to this was sarcastic in which he wrote on Twitter that the investors "should buy Ford stock" because "their governance is astounding." But after two days, he assured Two days later, he pledged for the inclusion of two independent board members along with previously present board members, including; CEO and Chairman of Johnson Publishing Company Linda Johnson Rice; and Daimler executive Herbert Kohle

Business strategy

At the time of the establishment of Tesla, electric vehicles were quite expensive. In the beginning, Tesla intended to produce costly but low-volume vehicles such as sports cars for those consumers for which price did not matter. This judgment would help them bring down the cost of batteries, allowing them to offer low-cost and higher-volume cars. As a result, their first car was a low-volume one.

Delays

The company's CEO has continued under much criticism for his delays in the stated production and release dates. In 2016, Musk predicted the creation of around 5000 units per week by December but postponed it afterward.

Litigation faced by Tesla

Tesla and its CEO Musk have suffered over 1000 lawsuits as of December 2020. The prevailing cases hold CEO performance awards, SolarCity ownership, Musk's funding acquired tweet, and many others. But some of the legal issues arose from his controversial remarks. The agreement of fraud charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission happened after Musk's misleading statement in September 2018. The payment terms offered it compelling for Musk to get his tweet reviewed by Tesla's in-house counsel. The company's chairman temporarily stopped working as a, and two new independent board directors also preferred. The company and the CEO were also responsible for paying penalties of 20 million dollars.

Lawsuits against others

Tesla also opened the case against Alex Katilov in January 2021 on the accusations that he transferred essential Tesla knowledge by downloading files pertinent to its Warp Drive software to his personal Dropbox account. Khatilov denied the allegations of willful and malicious thieves, and he supposed it an accidental data transfer. Guangzhi Cao, working as an engineer at Tesla, also faced the accusation of uploading Tesla Autopilot source code to his iCloud account.