IS MUSK A MAGICIAN

Introduction

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman. He is the founder, CEO and Chief

Engineer at SpaceX which works toward his dream of colonizing Mars. He is the CEO and product architect of

Tesla Inc, founder of the Boring Company,which he literally decided to start to dig holes underneath the ground

to solve Traffic jams while being stuck in one. He is also the co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. He co-founded

the online bank X.com which later merged with Confinity in 2000 to form what is known as PayPal today. To be

concise, an eccentric genius. It is a running joke that his mind runs so fast, that he is unable to process that into

speech in time which leads him to stutter in his interviews.

Main Body

Tesla is now synonymous with Elon Musk, but it was in fact founded by two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs: Martin

Eberhard & Marc Tarpenning embarked on an idea of a prototype electric sports car called the AC Propulsion

Tzero. In July 2003, they founded Tesla Motors, named after Nikola Tesla. Being an unusual idea, many

investors passed and Elon Musk happened to be one of the earliest investors to the extent of $6.3m and took up

the Chairman position.

In 2006, Tesla unveiled the Roadster to great fanfare at an event and 100 cars were sold to customers dubbed the

“Signature One Hundred Members”. The car received massively positive reviews as it was the first of it’s kind and

Tesla’s use of Lithium ion batteries gave them an edge over competitor EVs from General Motors etc. However

Tesla was struck with production delays, unforeseen problems and spiralling costs and no cars were produced till

March 2008. Only 30 cars were delivered by September that day and by Christmas, Tesla was on the verge of

bankruptcy even after having the immense popularity and scope of growth.
An internal power struggle within the company led to Eberhard being sacked as CEO and Musk taking over the

position along with firing a quarter of Tesla’s employees. In 2009, it’s electric design was recognized by the US

Govt. which gave Tesla a $465m clean energy loan, and Daimler AG took a 10% stake in the company. On June

29, 2010, the company became public with an IPO on NASDAQ and raised $226m with 13.3m shares at $17. As a

marker for the company’s success and investor’s belief in it’s future endeavours, the TSLA share stands at $1067

per share at the time of us writing this article marking an approximately 6200% increase in it’s valuation ever

since its inception.

Tesla ceased Roadster production in 2012 and launched the Model S Luxury Sedan and that car went on to win

several awards between 2012-13 and was the first electric car to top the monthly sales ranking of a country. Tesla

was finally on a road to exponential growth of production. In September 2015, Tesla started shipping it’s Tesla

Model X which had received a massive 25000 pre-orders. The company, being on a roll of success, started selling

its 4th model, the Model 3 Sedan, in July 2017. This was the cheaper, more budget oriented model Tesla had

produced and has gone to be the most successful model, overtaking the sale of its own previous models and other

EVs in markets like the US, Europe and China.

Although this car faced production delays from August 2017, by which it had already received 455000 pre

bookings, Tesla Inc. was able to overcome the problems and by the end of 2018, the Model 3 became the world’s

best selling plug-in electric vehicle for the year.

Ever since, Tesla has opened its “Gigafactories” around the world in Shanghai,China which has been completed

and is operational with the other two at Berlin,Germany and Texas,United States which are under construction.

This laid down the foundation of Tesla’s current exponential level of vehicle deliveries and helped overcome the

core problem that had always plagued it from its inception, unable to meet delivery deadlines. By March 2020,

Tesla had already begun the delivery of it’s 5th vehicle, the Model Y crossover. By the end of that year, Tesla had

built 500,000 cars in that year, which seems to be just the beginning of how much the company can expand in

the future years. Currently, Tesla has sold more than 630000 cars in 2021 within the first 3 quarters which has

already surpassed its number of sales in 2020 by almost 26% in 3/4th of the time.
The rapid growth this company has had even after facing so many issues over the years is almost an inspirational

story. Tesla has had to recall hundreds of thousands of it’s vehicles over the years due to production errors, faulty

parts or software issues that might have safety issues under normal driving conditions. Everytime this has made

stock prices plummet and wipe off shareholder’s wealth. A situation arose in 2017 when Elon Musk had decided

to sell off Tesla to Tim Cook, current CEO of Apple Inc. but Cook wasn’t interested. But since then, the company

has managed to come out on top of every hurdle they’ve encountered.

Conclusion

Till date, Tesla Inc remains a company with no particular PR department, no advertising budget and a company

with no commercials or promotions. This company has sold 100% of it’s products based on the eccentric public

image of Elon Musk and the immense fan following that he commands over social media, namely Twitter where

people see him both posting memes as well as make public polls that he promises would dictate whether he sells

off around $20b worth of shares. He is the man who slept on the factory floor because that’s what he had to do to

take Tesla Inc to the heights it is at right now. Surely, nothing lasts forever. One day both Tesla Inc and Elon

Musk will falter to some competitor, if not in our lifetime, then definitely in the next one. Surely one day the

analysis of experts of TSLA stocks being overvalued will catch up with the shareholders and will wipe off billions

of wealth from the market. But till then, we have nothing to do but revel at the man who has had a midas touch to

any company or piece of software he has touched ever since 1971.