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Elon Musk, the chairman and major funder of Tesla Motors, said on Saturday that he plans to take his electric sports car company public by the end of 2008.
Before the IPO, however, Musk said he will raise a series E round of financing to bring the company to profitability and begin production on Tesla's luxury electric sedan, codenamed White Star, by 2010. The goals will be reached by selling a roughly ten per cent stake in the company in the series E round, and through a Department of Energy loan of between $100m and $200m (£50m and £100m), Musk said. A future IPO would raise on the order of $100 million, he said.
Musk, who was speaking in Santa Clara, California, at the TieCon conference ("Tie" is short for "The Indus Entrepreneur"), also said that he's considering how the company might allow customers of the £50,000-plus Tesla Roadster to invest before the IPO, similar to the auction-style offering that delivered Google to the public markets.
"We are trying to figure out if there's a way for Tesla customers to invest in that (series E) round...but we want to make sure we don't step on any legal landmines," said the 36-year-old Musk, dressed in his characteristic t-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots.
Musk gave a keynote speech at the two-day conference, which drew as many as 4,000 attendees. During his interview on stage with Silicon Valley author Mike Malone, he talked about his three long-time passions: the internet, renewable energy and space exploration.
During the dot-com heyday, Musk founded two internet companies -- the most notable of which, PayPal, sold to eBay for $1.8 billion (£919m). Now, he owns two companies related to renewable energy, Solar City and Tesla Motors. And in space exploration, Musk runs SpaceX, a private rocketry company that has secured a contract with NASA to replace the space shuttle after 2010 in servicing the International Space Station.
Clearly a pioneer in these fields, Musk has bold predictions for these markets. One is that he will put a man on Mars by 2030. Though he admitted it might not come true by then.
He was more definitive about the other goals. "Thirty years from now the majority of new cars will be pure electric, not hybrid," Musk said. On renewable energy, he said, "We will derive more energy from solar than anything else in the United States."
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