Why Is It Called Tesla? A Name Borrowed From an Inventor

The origin: a motor, a restaurant table, and a trademark held by a stranger

Nikola Tesla is the reason the word is on the car. He filed the patents that made the polyphase AC induction motor practical in 1888, and a century later that machine was the natural choice for an electric sports car. The name is an argument about engineering, settled before there was a company to attach it to.

1. 2003: the brief, and the nameMartin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning are building an electric car meant to be fast rather than worthy. Eberhard has said the name arrived over dinner at the Blue Bayou inside Disneyland: he was thinking about the motor, and the motor was an AC induction motor, the machine Nikola Tesla patented in 1888.
2. April 2003: the domain they could getTarpenning registered teslamotors.com before the company existed. Note which string was available: the long one. tesla.com had been taken since 1992.
3. 1 July 2003: Tesla Motors is incorporatedEberhard and Tarpenning found the company in San Carlos, California, Eberhard as CEO and Tarpenning as CFO. The name is settled by now, which matters for the question everybody asks next.
4. February 2004: Elon Musk funds it and takes the chairMusk contributes the large majority of a 7.5 million dollar round and joins as chairman, becoming CEO in October 2008. All of it happens after the name.
5. Late 2004: the mark has to be boughtThe rights to “Tesla Motors” were already registered to somebody else, and the company had to buy them.
6. February 2016: tesla.com finally arrivesThe exact-match domain stayed in other hands until almost thirteen years into trading. Everything until then shipped on teslamotors.com.

Read that as a founder rather than as a fan. Two of the six steps are the company paying to use a name it had already committed to, and the second lands almost thirteen years into trading. That is what happens when the word you love is a real word real people already own.

Did Elon Musk name Tesla? No, and the dates are not close

This is the most common misconception about the name, and the timeline settles it. Tesla Motors was incorporated on 1 July 2003 by Eberhard and Tarpenning. Musk’s investment closed in February 2004, when he put in the large majority of a 7.5 million dollar round and became chairman, and he became chief executive in October 2008.

The co-founder question is separate, and was settled legally rather than historically: a 2009 settlement allows Eberhard, Tarpenning, Ian Wright, Musk and JB Straubel each to be described as a co-founder. That is a real status, and it is not authorship of the name. Musk has said as much himself, telling 60 Minutes in December 2018 that the founders did not come up with or own the name. The misconception persists anyway, which is the lesson: once a company is one person’s property in public, earlier decisions get attributed to them too.

The homage name: borrowing a reputation you did not build

Most origin stories in this series are about manufacturing meaning: a founder coins a word and spends thirty years filling it. Tesla did the opposite, taking a name that already carried a full argument, made by somebody dead, unaffiliated and unable to object. Call it the homage name. On day one the word says electricity and invention, and none of that had to be advertised into existence.

Set that against using your own surname, which starts with thin meaning but a clean asset: nobody else can claim your name is theirs. The homage inverts both halves. You get meaning for free, and you never own the source of it. Nikola Tesla’s reputation is edited by biographers and internet argument, outside the company’s control. That first route is in should you name a business after yourself, and there is a cheaper variant of this one: borrow from myth rather than history. A Greek goddess of victory carries meaning too, and no estate and no trademark filed in 1994, as why is it called Nike works through.

The tax on a borrowed name: bought twice, eleven years apart

A famous real name is famous to everybody, registrars and trademark filers included. Two other people had got there before Eberhard did.

• The mark, 2004By Musk’s own account, “Tesla Motors” had been filed for in 1994 by Brad Siewert of Sacramento, and the company bought the rights from him in late 2004 for 75,000 dollars. The backup name was Faraday.
• The domain, 2016Stu Grossman had registered tesla.com in 1992, out of admiration for the same inventor. It changed hands in February 2016. Musk later said publicly that it took over a decade and 11 million dollars; Grossman was under a non-disclosure agreement and never confirmed a number.

The strings you can fall in love with are exactly the strings other people already loved, so for a name of this type availability is most of the decision, not a detail after it.

1. Phonetics: two syllables that survive an accent

Say it: TES-la. Two syllables, stress unmistakably on the first, and the s and the l sit on opposite sides of a syllable boundary rather than stacking into a cluster, so there is nothing to trip on. Five letters, no silent ones, no fork between two plausible spellings, no diacritic to lose in a form field. Heard once, it types straight back out, which is the most underrated property a name can have.

The honest deduction is a split nobody has settled: some speakers say “TESS-la” and others “TEZ-la”. Eberhard has said in an interview that he uses the hard s, while admitting he does not know how Nikola Tesla said his own name. Inheriting a name from another language means inheriting a pronunciation question you do not get to answer by yourself.

2. Memorability: easy to recall, hard to own

This is where the analysis has to resist the pull of the logo. Scored as a fresh candidate in 2003, before any of the fame, “Tesla” is not a distinctive string. It was a family name carried by thousands of living people. It was, and still is, the SI unit of magnetic flux density, adopted in 1960. And it was already somebody’s registered trademark. Three prior claims on five letters.

Recall is not the problem. A short, concrete, familiar word is effortless to remember and impossible to misspell, which is why founders reach for real words at all. Ownership is the problem. A coined name like Kodak starts as nobody’s property and becomes wholly yours; a borrowed one starts as everybody’s and has to be prised loose a registration at a time. That is why this lands in Good rather than Strong, and the traits that carry more of the load by themselves are in what makes a brand name memorable.

3. Cross-language: no flags, and one thing no checker can see

The check finds no flags across the languages examined: nothing rude, nothing unfortunate when the word is clipped or heard quickly, no accented characters to mangle in transit. The honest phrasing is no flags in the languages checked, never a blanket “safe”, since no automated pass clears every dialect on earth.

A borrowed personal name has a genuine advantage here. Surnames tend to be phonetically conservative and semantically empty outside their own country, so they rarely collide with slang the way invented words do.

• What the check readsSound, spelling, slang collisions and rendering, language by language, across the markets you name. A machine can answer most of that.
• What it cannot readReputation. A real person’s name carries whatever that person means in each culture, and that shifts over decades without consulting you. Ask somebody local in each major market what your name evokes.

The full method is in the cross-language safety checklist.

The Namoly Report simulation: “Tesla”

Here is how “Tesla” performs against the four weighted checks, scored as a candidate in 2003 rather than on the company it became. This is an illustrative worked example: the overall is the weighted mean of the sub-scores, using the weights every real report uses (domain 0.30, memorability 0.25, phonetics 0.25, cross-language safety 0.20).

• Global Namoly Score64 / 100Good
• ReadabilityHighTwo syllables, one clear stress
• Linguistic safetyMediumNo flags in the languages checked

1. Domain availabilityweight 0.30The honest floor. A short, real surname is one of the most contested string types there is, and tesla.com had been registered since 1992 by someone else. The company shipped its first cars and went public on teslamotors.com.42Fair
2. Memorability & distinctivenessweight 0.25Short, concrete and easy to hold, but not a new object. “Tesla” was already a family name, already the SI unit of magnetic flux density, and already somebody else’s trademark. Recall is cheap here; ownability was expensive.64Good
3. Phonetics & readabilityweight 0.25TES-la: two syllables, stress unmistakably on the first, no consonant stack to fracture, and it types straight back out after one hearing. The small deduction is a live split between “TESS-la” and “TEZ-la” that has never been settled.82Strong
4. Cross-language safetyweight 0.20No flags across the languages checked: no rude readings, no diacritics to lose, nothing awkward when it is clipped or said fast. Medium rather than High because a real person’s name carries a reputation, which is not a linguistic property a checker can read.76Good
5. Overall Namoly Scoreweighted meanA clean, portable, instantly meaningful word sitting on the worst domain position in this series, because meaning that good was never going to be unclaimed. Good rather than Strong, and the gap is almost entirely the price of borrowing.64Good

• Strong80–100Short, distinctive, sticks after one exposure.
• Good60–79Solid and workable; minor trade-offs.
• Fair40–59Usable but forgettable or hard to spell.
• Weak0–39Reconsider; friction outweighs the upside.

Illustrative analysis for education. Every number in a real report ships with a justification, a confidence signal, and a tip. Not checked here: trademark and social-handle availability.

What founders can take from a name that had to be bought

You are probably not naming a car company after a dead physicist, but every decision underneath this name is one you will face too.

• A tribute imports meaning you did not buildBorrowing a real person’s name hands you a story on day one: competence, electricity, a particular kind of genius. That is the appeal and the risk at once, because the reputation stays with its owner. You are renting a legacy other people edit.
• Make the reference load-bearingTesla’s homage was literal: the first car ran a descendant of the motor the man patented. That is why it never reads as costume. A reference that does no work is decoration you will still be explaining in year five.
• Check who holds the string firstThe founders settled on the name, registered the compromise domain, incorporated, and only then met a 1994 trademark filing. That order is the expensive one.
• A compromise domain is survivable, and it costsTesla shipped two cars, an IPO and a decade of press on teslamotors.com, so second choice is not fatal. It still charged rent, on every advertisement, for thirteen years.
• Do not put a word in the name that scopes youThe borrowed surname survived everything. The word bolted onto it did not. Any category noun is a bet that your category will not move.

How to find out who holds a string is in how to check if a brand name is available, the order to lock one down in afterwards is in how to secure a brand name, and the trade-offs between an exact-match .com, a longer variant and a different extension are in tech startup domain names.

“Motors” had to go. The surname did not.

On 1 February 2017, Tesla Motors, Inc. became Tesla, Inc. By then the company sold home and grid batteries and had acquired SolarCity, so a name announcing motors described a fraction of the business. Look at which half needed the filing. The borrowed surname absorbed the change without comment, because it had never claimed to describe anything: it pointed at an inventor, and inventors are not a product category. The noun stapled to it expired instead. Samsung shows the same over a longer span, going from dried fish to semiconductors under a name meaning “three stars”, in why is it called Samsung. Every category word in a name is a forecast about how wide the business will get, made on the day you know least, and whether a wrong one is worth fixing is its own decision, in when to rename your startup.

Frequently asked questions

Why is it called Tesla?

The company is named in honour of Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor whose 1888 patents produced the AC induction motor. The first Tesla car ran a descendant of that motor, so the tribute was literal rather than decorative.

Did Elon Musk name Tesla?

No. The name was chosen in 2003 by co-founder Martin Eberhard, and the company was incorporated as Tesla Motors on 1 July 2003 by Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Musk invested in February 2004 and became chairman, then CEO in October 2008. A 2009 settlement lets him call himself a co-founder, but the name predates him.

Did Tesla have to buy the name?

Yes. By Musk’s own public account, the rights to “Tesla Motors” had been filed for in 1994 by Brad Siewert of Sacramento, and the company bought them from him in late 2004 for 75,000 dollars. Musk has also said the alternative name was Faraday.

Why did Tesla wait so long for tesla.com?

Because somebody else owned it. Stu Grossman registered tesla.com in 1992, and the company traded on teslamotors.com until the domain changed hands in February 2016. Musk later said publicly that it took over a decade and 11 million dollars; the seller signed a non-disclosure agreement and never confirmed a figure.

Why did Tesla drop “Motors” from its name?

The business outgrew the word. On 1 February 2017 Tesla Motors, Inc. became Tesla, Inc., after the company moved into home and grid batteries and acquired SolarCity, at which point “Motors” named only part of what it sold.

How was this score calculated?

The numbers here are illustrative, built from the same four checks Namoly runs on any name: domain availability, memorability, phonetics, and cross-language safety. The overall is the weighted mean of the sub-scores, using the canonical weights (0.30, 0.25, 0.25, 0.20).