Elon Musk had a deal to sell Tesla to Google in 2013 for about $6B and another $5B in capital for factory expansions
Elon Musk Had a Deal to Sell Tesla to Google in 2013 — On the verge of bankruptcy, the company sought a savior in Larry Page — This story is excerpted and adapted …
Context & Ripple Effects
In early 2013 Tesla was close enough to failure that Elon Musk negotiated a full exit: roughly $6B for the company from Larry Page's Google, plus another $5B committed to expand the factories. The deal never closed, and the intervening years inverted the roles entirely — Musk went from near-seller to serial acquirer, including an attempt to walk away from the Twitter purchase he had signed, which contemporaries compared to his earlier pretense about taking Tesla private.
The retrospective value of this disclosure is the counterfactual it kills: the independent Tesla that survived to sign Samsung's $16.5B AI6 chip deal through 2033 and field Austin robotaxis that analysts say trail Waymo would have been a Google division, with Page deciding its capital allocation instead.
First-order effects
- Google under Page held a negotiated path to owning Tesla at roughly $6B plus $5B of expansion capital — the deal's collapse left Tesla independent and kept Musk in control at his moment of maximum vulnerability.
- For Musk, the episode documents that he was a willing seller at a fraction of Tesla's later scale, reframing his subsequent buyer-side behavior on Twitter as part of a longer pattern rather than an anomaly.
Second-order effects
- Tesla's continued independence is what allowed it to become a principal customer committing billions to Samsung's Texas fab through 2033 — inside Google, that chip commitment would have been Google's decision, not Tesla's.
- Counterparties learned to treat Musk's announced transactions as starting positions: his representatives sought up to a 30% discount on the revived Twitter bid before closing, consistent with a negotiator who has previously floated deals he did not intend to complete.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, markets will keep pricing 'Musk deal' announcements as options rather than commitments — raising the cost of certainty for banks, boards, and suppliers who structure financing around his signatures.
- The 2013 episode also marks the road not taken for tech-industry consolidation: a Google-owned Tesla would have folded EVs and autonomy into one acquirer's stack instead of leaving Google's Waymo and Tesla's robotaxi programs as separate, competing systems.
The trend: Musk's dealmaking has moved from selling companies out of distress in 2013 to announcing acquisitions and supply commitments that counterparties must underwrite as reversible — with each episode recalibrating how seriously his signatures are taken.