How Elon Musk Saved Tesla From Getting Acquired By Tesla

Bloomberg's Ashlee Vance new book “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future," which is due for release on May 19 has already created quite a stir. In the book Vance revelas how Google Inc GOOGL was about to acquire Tesla Motors Inc TSLA in a $6 billion deal in 2013.

Vance was on Bloomberg TV Monday to discuss about this deal that never happened.

Lined-Up Customers

“It got pretty serious, I mean Tesla had been, it was in that interesting spot it had gotten some really good reviews on the Model S that had been out for about 6 months, but there were all these customers who were lined up,” Vance said.

“They were in-line to buy the car and they offered to do these pre-sales, but they weren’t committing to doing the sales and Tesla was running out of money and Elon had to come up with a plan to save the company just in case it went under.”

Punishing The Company

On how Elon Musk turned the company around Vance said, “They were the early adopters who sort of wanted a computer on wheels and they were out there buying the car. The rest of the people who were waiting on the sidelines a bit and some of the early Model S’s had glitches with the door handles or the wind-shields, wipers sort of working out the [kinks].”

“And so, I think people were also sort of waiting for new colors and new software updates and so this is what really was kind of punishing the company and when Elon found out about it, I think the executives had tried not let Elon know how severe it was for a little while and when he found out he sort of turned the whole company around,” Vance concluded.