Elon Musk revealed Sunday he paid $11 million for tesla.com in 2016, making it the second largest publicly revealed price paid for a domain name.
Musk revealed the purchase price in a series of Tweets in response to a promotion for CBS’s 60 Minutes program where he was being interviewed. In the promotional video Musk tells Lesley Stahl how he paid $75,000 for his company’s name.
Musk went on to Tweet he “didn’t actually come up with the Tesla Motors name. Bought trademark off Brad Siewert for $75k in late 2004. He’d originally filed for it in 1994. Our alternative name was Faraday, which was used by a competitor several years later.”
Later Musk Tweeted “Buying http://Tesla.com took over a decade, $11M & amazing amount of effort. Didn’t like http://teslamotors.com even when we were only making 🚘.”
Writing on Musk’s purchase of tesla.com, Konstantinos Zournas wrote on his Online Domain that Musk paid “$11 million because obviously the seller was not motivated. Elon Musk was trying to purchase the domain for 10 years and kept failing.” Zournas also wrote the “seller was smart enough to use a domain name industry attorney, John Berryhill, at some point of the negotiations or maybe after the 2 parties agreed on the price and a contract was needed.”
According to Domain Name Journal’s chart of top reported domain name sales, Musk’s purchase of tesla.com comes in only behind sex.com, which sold/was purchased for $13 million.
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