AllThingsD » Model S

Tesla IPO Firing on All Cylinders Batteries [UPDATED]

John Paczkowski — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 21:12:34 +0000

Tesla Motors went public today in the first initial public offering from an American car company since Ford’s (F) in 1956. And already, its stock appears to have attracted a cult following.

Floated with an initial offering price of $17, shares in the company opened at $19 and closed at $23.89–up $6.89, or 40.5 percent. Not a surprise, really, since Tesla (TSLA) raised the size of the IPO to 13.3 million shares from 11.1 million shares yesterday, presumably because of strong interest in the offering from investors.

That Tesla hasn’t earned a dime since it was founded in 2003 and doesn’t expect to post a quarterly profit until at least 2012 doesn’t seem to have fazed investors, who are evidently quite impressed with the company’s $109,000 all-electric Roadster and the fact that it has managed to sell 1,063 of the vehicles in less than two years.

“A lot of people were puzzled about why we were going public without profits,” CEO Elon Musk said today. “The reason we are not profitable today is because we are in the midst of expanding with the Model S.”

The bet here, then, seems to be the promise of the S, the $50,000 electric sedan the company plans to bring to market in 2013. And that appears to be working out quite well for Tesla.

Who Shot Valleywag? Gossip Bloggers Thomas (Outgoing) and Tate (Incoming) Speak!

Kara Swisher — Sat, 02 May 2009 04:20:43 +0000

Was it Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg in Fraiche Yogurt with a Macbook Air? Or Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk on the streets of San Francisco with a Model S? Or, most likely of all, Marissa Mayer of Google in the penthouse with a Manolo Blahnik spiked heel?

For all the invective this trio has taken from him, all would certainly be prime suspects if some nefarious fate befell always controversial Valleywag gossip blogger Owen Thomas.

Actually, the truth is a little more mundane: The self-described “scourge of [Silicon] Valley” is moving onto another digital job as head of GE (GE) unit NBC Universal’s new Bay Area Web site, whose motto is “Locals Only.”

There, the 37-year-old Thomas will run a site that focuses on news from around the San Francisco region, with a mix of national stories. But, sources said, he is still going to continue to drill down on tech too, so those burned before by him should not relax too much.

Thomas has been running Valleywag since mid-2007. Its staff got pretty large for a while, until it was recently downsized and its content stuffed into Gawker, the flagship site of Gawker Media. The Valleywag site remains, though, and will continue to.

And it will now be the domain of deceptively fresh-faced Ryan Tate, Thomas’s replacement. The Berkeley resident, 32, has been the night editor for Gawker since early last year.

Interestingly, Tate was an intern for The Wall Street Journal’s California edition and also worked for tech-oriented publications like Business 2.0, Upside and the San Francisco Business Times.

Thomas is reportedly staying on at Valleywag through the middle of the month and then it will be Tate’s turn to make mischief with tech’s more puffed-up mandarins.

In an effort to scare Tate into steering clear of BoomTown, I invited the pair to All Things Digital HQ this rainy afternoon for a little sit-down to discuss where the controversial site has been and where it is going.

Here’s the video (and below it, a video interview I did with Thomas and then-Valleywag writer Megan McCarthy, when he got the job):

[ See post to watch video ]

Tesla Foiled

John Paczkowski — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:42:04 +0000

While $25 billion in low-cost federal loans keeps General Motors (GM), Ford (F) and Chrysler churning out SUVs through the econalypse, the wheels are coming off cleantech car company Tesla Motors. Without access to the same sorts of loans given its Detroit colleagues, the country’s leading electric car maker is delaying production of its Model S sedan, sacking an unspecified number of employees and shuttering two offices. “These are extraordinary times,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk wrote in post to the company blog. “The global financial system has gone through the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and the effects are only beginning to wind their way through every facet of the economy. It’s not an understatement to say that nearly every business will be impacted by what has unfolded in the past weeks, and this is true for Silicon Valley as well.”