Recently, on January 9, 2024, Tesla entered the top eight automakers in the US in terms of market share. Per Yahoo Finance, Tesla reported a 4.2% US automobile market share, which put it above other established automakers such as Subaru (4.1%), Volkswagen (4.1%), and BMW (2.5%). What this means is that Tesla sales made up 4.2% of all the automobile sales in the US, a whopping 25.4% increase from 2022 reports, according to data from Cox Automotive. Cox analysts predicts that sales of the new Tesla vehicles will reach up to 15.7 million in 2024: a slight increase from the 15.5 million recorded in 2023.
“I think [Tesla] will grow very rapidly, much faster than any other car company on Earth, by far,” Elon Musk, the renowned founder and CEO of Tesla, Inc, said in November of 2023 to NASDAQ reporters. Musk believes Tesla will continue to grow, but how has the company gotten this far already? How has Tesla achieved this great feat in such a risky and volatile EV market? Here’s a brief background on the history of Tesla, Inc since its creation over two decades ago.
Tesla Inc. was founded by American entrepreneurs Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003. Eberhard was Tesla’s chief executive officer (CEO), while Tarpenning served the role of chief financial officer (CFO), according to Britannica. The two founders based their company name on Nikola Tesla, who was a Serbian-American inventor and engineer. In the beginning, Eberhard and Tarpenning created the company with one goal in mind: to develop an electric sports car. Although these two founders are often overlooked in the modern day, they were crucial to laying the foundation and establishing the company Tesla. To this day, Musk states on the official Tesla website that their goal when creating the company was “the same as it is today: to accelerate the advent of sustainable transport by bringing compelling mass market electric cars to market as soon as possible.”
Elon Musk, who is the leading figure and largest shareholder of Tesla today, was exceptionally crucial for the initial funding for the company twenty years ago. Back in 2004, Musk had been a confounder of PayPal, and he found much interest and potential in Tesla Inc. Starting later that year, Musk contributed more than $30 million to the new electric vehicle company, and took a prominent role as the chairman of the company. Ever since, Musk’s influence has been immense.
According to Investing, the Tesla Roadster, the company’s first electric vehicle, was first introduced and entered the market in 2008. While sales were not very high with only 500 Roadsters being sold until June of 2009, the Roadster prototype marked the beginning of a new era of electrical cars from Tesla. In 2017, Musk and Tesla announced its Model 3 Vehicle, which reached sales of 500,000 in 2021 after becoming “the world’s most popular electrical vehicle” in 2020. Tesla continued to grow to its zenith by releasing other renowned vehicles such as its Model Y, Model S, Model X, and more recently, the Tesla Cybertruck.
Tesla’s advancing growth and its revolutionary technology over the last two decades is truly incredible to reflect on. With its continuous innovation with its electric vehicles, Tesla has not only come to dominate the electric car market, but are showing signs of potentially dominating the entire automobile industry in the next few decades. With remarkable growths of sales predicted to continue in the years to come, perhaps Tesla automobiles may become one of the most recognizable cars on the streets in the near, distant future.
