Through a podcast last week Elon Musk recalled the story about the Tesla.com domain and how much it cost. And while it’s hard to believe, Tesla Inc. took longer to obtain the right to use the domain name of the Tesla.com website to design, build, and sell their first car.
It should be noted that from the beginning, Tesla owned TeslaMotors.com. Later, in 2016, Tesla acquired the domain name Tesla.com, a domain registered long before electric cars came to mind. Elon Musk.
But it wasn’t until December 2018 that the brand’s founder finally revealed how much the Tesla.com domain cost.
How much did the Tesla.com domain cost?
Musk told the story again last week in Third Row Tesla Podcast, about how it took nearly a decade for Silicon Valley engineer Stuart Grossman to agree to sell the rights to Tesla.com. The company had been using TeslaMotors.com, but the CEO always saw it as more than just a car company and wanted the basic domain name.
“That took us 10 years to buy that Tesla.com domain,” Musk stated on the podcast. Next, he expressed: “That cost us about 10 million dollars.”
However, by 2018, Musk expressed on Twitter that he actually cost $11 million and it took an “incredible amount of effort” to get Grossman’s domain name.
buying https://t.co/46TXqRrsdr took over a decade, $11M & amazing amount of effort. Didn’t like https://t.co/BsRfMrY9Gm even when we were only making 🚘.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2018
Grossman stated in an interview three years ago, after news broke that Tesla bought the domain name, that he hadn’t been using it at all, and that it was more trouble than it was worth maintaining.
“It was becoming a burden,” Grossman specified in said interview in 2016. He also indicated that “despite being isolated by the privacy scheme of my registrar, people still located me.” Obviously, Tesla also tracked it down and since then it has the Tesla.com domain.
It is worth mentioning that Musk also acquired the trademark for the Tesla name. They bought it from Brad Siewert in 2004 for $75,000. If they had not succeeded, they planned to use an alternative name for the company, Faraday.
Why did the TeslaMotors.com domain not work?
The TeslaMotors.com domain name had some problems, this led Musk to pay so much money just to get the Tesla.com domain.
First, large companies feel they need to have an exact match for their company name on .com. There’s something that feels “cheap” about TeslaMotors.com for a company called Tesla, considering that big, cutting-edge companies boast their company names.
Another problem is that many people may have typed in Tesla.com when they wanted to search for the TeslaMotors.com website. Plus customers and vendors could have emailed @tesla.com instead of @teslamotors.com.
Although the most important thing is that Tesla is no longer just a car company. You are introducing the Powerwall battery storage system. They even have a sunroof. Tesla.com can be used for all products and services that the company may invent in the future.
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