Elon Musk told his private audience that he paid $10 Million for tesla.com in a video posted on a Third Row Tesla podcast.
In 2018, Elon Musk Tweeted that it actually cost $11 million, and took an “amazing amount of effort,” to get the domain name off Grossman.
Buying tesla.com took over a decade, $11M & amazing amount of effort. Didn’t like teslamotors.com even when we were only making .
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2018
It took Elon Musk about a decade to get Silicon Valley engineer Stuart Grossman to sell the rights to Tesla.com to Tesla Motors. The transfer happened in February 2016.
Telsa.com is currently registered to MarkMonitor on behalf of Tesla
Stuart Grossman registered it on 1992-11-04. Tesla is the surname of the famous Nikola Tesla; he was the inventor of AC motors and many other electrical inventions.
In 2005, domain name attorney John Berryhill helped Grossman defend his domain name in a UDRP, brought by a company named Tesla Industries, Inc.
Musk and company bought the TESLA trademark from Brad Siewert in 2004 for $75,000. Had they not been able to get it, they’d planned to use an alternative name for the company, Faraday.