Elon Musk surprises again, this time with an unusual statement that opens the possibility of a possible merger with a car manufacturer. After making Tesla, a startup born from scratch, in less than 20 years the most valuable car manufacturer in the world in terms of stock prices, now is the time to explore, from the top, new options.
The Palo Alto company has never been a subsidiary brand of any manufacturer, although it has been associated with Toyota and Mercedes-Benz, for whom it has manufactured electric powertrains.
The collaborations that emerged at difficult times for the California-based brand ended in the mid-2010s, coinciding with the launches of the models that established Tesla as a real alternative in the market.
First Mercedes in 2014 and later Toyota in 2017, both companies sold their shares in Tesla with lower profits than a sale would entail at the current price of shares listed under the acronym: TSLA.
Elon Musk, who has received the so-called Oscar of the engineers: the Axel Springer Prize Award in Germany, surprised locals and strangers after confessing during an interview a frankly explosive idea:
“We are definitely not launching a hostile takeover, but if someone said it would be a good idea to merge with Tesla, we would have this conversation.” – Elon Musk.
Tesla currently enjoys a significant competitive advantage over the competition. This distance with the rest of the manufacturers is recognized openly from the Volkswagen headquarters by Herbert Diess himself and his Audi partner Markus Duesmann.