In December 2008, Tesla was running out of time.
The electric car startup had been founded five years earlier by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning, with Elon Musk joining as an early investor and chairman. By late 2008, Musk was leading the company, and the global economy was in freefall.
That summer, Tesla had been preparing to close a $100 million funding round when the economy crashed, pushing the company toward bankruptcy by the end of the year. Raising money was extremely difficult for an electric car startup, which was considered a quirky idea at the time, especially while giants like GM and Chrysler were heading into bankruptcy.
Tesla laid off 18% of its workforce. Musk later said he had put all of his own money into the company, didn’t own a house and had to borrow money from friends to pay his rent.
The rescue came at the last possible moment. A funding round closed at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve 2008, as investors were leaving town for the holidays. According to Musk, Tesla was three days from bankruptcy.
The company went public in June 2010, and the gamble paid off. Over the next decade, Tesla grew into the world’s most valuable automaker.
Thirteen years after that Christmas Eve rescue, Musk made one of the biggest charitable gifts in the country. Between Nov. 19 and 29, 2021, he donated 5,044,000 Tesla shares, then trading at more than $1,000 each, worth about $5.7 billion in total.
The gift made Musk the second-biggest charitable donor in the US that year, behind only Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates. Its recipient wasn’t named at first, but Bloomberg later reported that the shares went to Musk’s own charitable arm, the Musk Foundation, making it one of the largest foundations in the country. The foundation’s largest grant that period was $55 million to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.
Today, the company that nearly folded in 2008 keeps pushing boundaries. Last week, Tesla unveiled a new Roadster equipped with cold gas thrusters that can launch the car into the air for short bursts.
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