Technology entrepreneur Elon Musk acquired the rights to the Tesla trademark in 2004 for a ‘mere’ 75,000 dollars, the UK daily The Independent recently reported. The name had originally belonged to one Brad Siewart, who’d registered Tesla as a trademark in 1994.
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Nearly Faraday
‘[Mr Siewart] was initially reluctant to sell,’ Musk claimed, adding that if the deal hadn’t gone through, the popular e-car would probably now be called Faraday, a name Musk had in reserve as a fall-back.
11 million dollars
However, when Tesla Motors abbreviated its name to Tesla in 2017, it cost rather more money and effort to acquire the domain name tesla.com. Musk eventually ended up paying 11 million dollars for it in 2017.