How Elon Musk Saved Tesla...

Have you been keeping up with the auto industry’s earnings season?

After today’s close, Tesla Motors will reveal their much anticipated Q2 results.

Tesla Motors Inc TSLA, which was the most shorted stock on the NASDAQ last year, has a knack for exciting investors – and often going against the norm.

Earlier this Summer, the American automotive startup hired Ganesh Srivat, a sales executive at the big name fashion label, Burberry.

Analysts found this hire as another example that Tesla is by no means an average car company – if it was, it would have recruited a sale executive from a big auto company like Ford, General Motors or Toyota.

The Man Behind The Machine

It should not go unnoticed that what Tesla did was pretty wild. Starting a mass-production car company is no easy feat, given the need for high upfront investment and low margins on the product.

The last American car start up was Ford, which was founded in 1903.

Tesla was just beginning nearly a century later. But in 2007 (as told by Wired), investors had poured almost $100 million in the auto company without a single car being produced. What’s worse, production cost of the Tesla Roadster had climbed to $140,000 -- more than double what investors had been told manufacturing the car would cost.

Enter: Paypal Millionaire Elon Musk

At the time, Musk was Tesla’s lead investor. After hearing about the dramatic increase in manufacturing costs, he took it upon himself to visit the body panel fabricator in England and found that right tools to build the Roadster weren’t even at the facility.

Telsa’s CEO and co-founder Marten Eberhard was demoted. No surprise there. Within a few months, he left the company entirely.

Eberhard was replaced as CEO by investor and former Fextronics exec Michael Marks, who identified myriad other issues with production, like ineffective transmission and unreliable seat quality.

Over the next couple of years, Musk invested millions more into Tesla, saw the Roadster finally hit the streets after the issues were resolved, assumed the role of CEO, convinced Daimler to buy 1,000 battery packs and eventually launched the Model S.

Oh, and he also started an aerospace manufacturing company. Is it any wonder that his tweets alone move the price of the stock?

The Model S And Beyond

Before the Model S launch, many investors had a negative outlook on the future of Tesla.

For example, Whitney Tilson, founder and managing partner of Kase Capital Management, who spoke on Benzinga’s #PreMarket Prep Show about his failed short on Tesla when it looked like it was heading towards bankruptcy.

But the Model S, a sports sedan, was a huge success, earning the company the coveted Motor Trend Car of the Year for 2013.

Musk bought a car factory in California in order to ramp production, oversaw every detail so the quality would improve, and sure enough the car was a hit.

Now, Tesla is seen as an innovative company and people are itching to know what is next.

Analysts anticipate a relatively strong quarter for the car company, but note that many Tesla investors care more about the growth of the company and scale of production than its current profitability.

Just hitting delivery expectations could be enough to bump up the stock.