Tesla Motors, Inc. is a Silicon Valley-based company that designs, manufactures and sells electric cars and electric vehicle powertrain components. Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TSLA.

Tesla Motors gained widespread attention by producing the Tesla Roadster, the first fully electric sports car. Tesla also sells electric powertrain components, including lithium-ion battery packs, to other automakers, including Daimler and Toyota.

Market analysts have called for Tesla to focus its efforts on supplying powertrain components to major automakers, which have the resources to mass produce electric cars. Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, has said he envisions Tesla as an independent automaker. Tesla has been developing the Model S, a fully electric luxury sedan. Although expensive, it is substantially cheaper than the Roadster. Eventually, Tesla Motors aims to mass produce fully electric cars at a price that would be affordable to the average consumer.

Elon Musk (born June 28, 1971) is a South African-born American business magnate, engineer and inventor. He is best known for co-founding SpaceX, Tesla Motors and X.com, which later became Paypal after acquiring the service. He is currently the CEO and Chief Designer of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla Motors and Chairman of SolarCity. While at those companies, Musk co-designed the first viable electric car of the modern era, the Tesla Roadster, a private successor to the Space Shuttle, Falcon 9/Dragon, and the world's largest Internet payment system, PayPal.

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a Canadian-American mother and a South African father. His maternal grandfather was from Minnesota, and had moved to Saskatchewan, where Musk's mother was born. His father is an engineer and his mother is an author, nutritionist and model, appearing on the cover of New York Magazine in 2011 and a Time Magazine supplement in 2010.

Musk bought his first computer at age 10 and taught himself how to program; by the age of 12 he sold his first commercial software for about $500, a space game called Blastar.