Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that if he hadn't bought the rights to the Tesla name, he was going to use the name "Faraday," which is now used by one of Tesla's competitors. According to Business Insider, Musk had to wait over 10 years and pay $11 million to purchase the rights to use Tesla.com. Tesla is named for the Serbian-American engineer and physicist Nikola Tesla, whose inventions and discoveries made possible the alternating-current motor used in many electric vehicles.