How Elon Musk Acquired the “Tesla” Name: The Little

In the early days of what would become one of the world’s most valuable companies, Tesla Inc. nearly had a completely different name. Elon Musk and his co-founders didn’t originally come up with “Tesla Motors” — they had to buy the trademark rights for $75,000 from a man in Sacramento, California, who had owned them for a decade.

The story dates back to 2004, when Musk joined founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning as a major investor and chairman. The team wanted to honor inventor Nikola Tesla by naming their electric car company after him. However, the “Tesla Motors” trademark was already registered in 1994 by Brad Siewert, a Sacramento resident who had no active plans to use it for a car company but held onto the rights.

Initially, Siewert refused to sell. Musk, determined to secure the name, employed a clever and persistent tactic: He sent one of the most polite and likable members of his team to Siewert’s doorstep. The employee was instructed to wait there — politely and persistently — refusing to leave until Siewert at least agreed to discuss the sale.

As Musk later recounted in interviews and on social media, “We sent the nicest person in the company to sit on his doorstep until he at least talked to us… and then he said yes.” The strategy worked. After some negotiation, Siewert agreed to sell the trademark for $75,000.

Without the deal, Tesla might have gone by its backup name: “Faraday,” inspired by physicist Michael Faraday. Ironically, that name was later used by electric vehicle competitor Faraday Future.

Musk shared this “Tesla history trivia” publicly in 2018 during a 60 Minutes interview and on X (formerly Twitter), noting the alternative could have changed everything. Today, with Tesla valued in the trillions and synonymous with electric vehicles, that $75,000 investment looks like one of the best deals in business history.

This anecdote highlights Musk’s relentless approach in Tesla’s formative years, turning obstacles into opportunities through creativity and determination. The company, now simply called Tesla, continues to dominate the EV market — all thanks to a polite knock on a door in Sacramento.