Tesla Motors aims to raise about $2 billion to help pay for an ambitious production ramp-up, including $1.4 billion through a stock offering.
DETROIT, MI - Tesla Motors aims to raise about $2 billion to help pay for an ambitious production ramp-up, including $1.4 billion through a stock offering, the company announced Wednesday in investor documents.
The stock offering includes 6,800,000 shares, and the projected $1.4 billion amount raised is based on the assumed public offering price of $204.66 per share.
The balance in funds raised will come from company CEO and co-founder Elon Musk, who also plans to exercise stock options as well, Bloomberg reports.
Proceeds from the sale will also go towards the launch of the company's Model 3 electric car, which is directly tied to its aggressive production ramp-up.
The company revealed the Model 3 to great hype at the end of March. With a starting price of $35,000, the Model 3 is meant to be the electric car for the masses.
The company said in Wednesday's documents that as of May 15, it has $1,000 deposits from about 373,000 customers making reservations on the Model 3.
That's a net amount, after about 8,000 cancellations by customers and another 4,000 orders cancelled by Tesla because the company believed them to be duplicates by speculators.
Tesla also notes that the large interest in the Model 3 followed little to no advertising ahead of time, save for a couple social media posts leading up to the March 31 unveiling.
"If we wanted to, we believe that we could further increase the number of Model 3 reservations with minimal effort, but believe it is better to guide customers to purchase products currently in production," the company says in the documents.
The significant demand the California company has seen has prompted it to try and increase its vehicle production to 500,000 units by 2018 - two years earlier than it had planned. Tesla is on target to build 80-90,000 electric vehicles this year.