On October 25, 2021, Tesla shares jumped nearly 13% to a record close of $1,024.86, and the carmaker’s market value passed $1 trillion for the first time. The trigger was an order: Hertz said it would buy 100,000 Model 3 cars. The Associated Press called Tesla the world’s most valuable automaker and put Elon Musk’s own wealth, per Forbes, at $255.8 billion that day.
That number is a good place to start for anyone, from Manila to Mumbai, trying to understand what this one company has done to the way people think about cars.
Not Musk’s company at first
Musk did not found Tesla. Two Silicon Valley engineers, Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, started Tesla Motors in July 2003 and named it after the inventor Nikola Tesla. Musk, a PayPal co-founder, led the first round of funding with $6.5 million and became chairman of the board in 2004. In 2008 he was elected CEO and product architect, the same year the Roadster appeared. The company dropped “Motors” and became Tesla Inc. in 2017.
Born in Pretoria on June 28, 1971, Musk left South Africa at 17 for Canada and became a US citizen in 2002, the year he founded SpaceX.
The cars, and the harder years
After the Roadster came the Model S in 2012 and the Model X in 2015. The Model 3 arrived in 2017 at a starting price of around $30K, and Yaabot says it passed a million units sold. The Model Y followed in 2020. The Cybertruck was first shown in November 2019 but reached customers only in November 2023, at a cost about $21,000 higher than first pitched, according to Biography.com. The Semi truck, unveiled in November 2017, was still not on the market as of December 2024 by the same account, although Yaabot dates its launch to December 2022.
Tesla’s lead in the US also slipped. It accounted for about 75 percent of electric vehicle sales there in 2019, and as little as 49 percent by the second quarter of 2024, partly because of production problems, safety worries and layoffs. Biography.com reports the company reportedly lost as much as 14 percent of its workforce in 2024 alone.
More than cars
In 2015 Tesla launched Tesla Energy, selling Powerwalls, solar roofs and solar panels. It bought SolarCity, founded by two of Musk’s cousins, for $2.6 billion in an all-stock deal completed in November 2016, a purchase that drew a shareholder lawsuit.
Musk’s other ventures run wide. He started The Boring Company in January 2017, and Neuralink was reported to be under his backing that year. In April 2022 he offered to buy Twitter at a value of around $43 billion, completed the purchase in October 2022, and later renamed it X. In March 2025 he sold X to his AI startup xAI in an all-stock deal valued at $33 billion.
Where the money is heading
For people across Asia, the market matters as much as the man. SkyQuest projects the global electric vehicle market growing from $661+ billion in 2023 to $1386+ billion by 2031, with Asia-Pacific, especially India and China, the fastest-growing region. Yaabot notes that Tesla’s presence in India is still developing.
Musk’s fortune is tied to the same swings. Forbes put it at $981 billion as of October 5, 2026. He briefly became the world’s first trillionaire on June 12, 2026, after SpaceX’s IPO, and lost the title two weeks later when SpaceX and Tesla shares dropped.
Sources
- Elon Musk: Biography, Entrepreneur, SpaceX and Tesla Founder (Biography.com) – Tesla and SolarCity sections
- Elon Musk: Biography, Entrepreneur, SpaceX and Tesla Founder (Biography.com) – early life, companies, Twitter and net worth
- Tesla Inc: A History and Evolution of Electric Cars (Yaabot, by Swati Gupta)
- Tesla's market value tops $1T after Hertz orders 100K cars (Associated Press via KSAT)
