Google could have been in the electric car business two years ago, had a deal with Elon Musk gone through.

elonmusk60According to a forthcoming book by Bloomberg Business reporter Ashlee Vance, Tesla founder Musk had reached a handshake deal with Google’s Larry Page early in 2013. Tesla’s ground-breaking Model S had yet to convert enough pre-orders into orders, and bankruptcy was said to be a possibility.

The proposed terms? Sell Tesla to Google for a reported $6 billion, keep Musk at the helm, and have Google invest another $5 billion in factory expansion.

But then, according to an excerpt of book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future released on Bloomberg Business, Model S sales began to take off and Musk didn’t pursue the sale.

Tesla’s struggles early on are well known. On a segment on television’s 60 Minutes in early 2014, Musk told CBS, “I thought we’d most likely fail.” But, he said, “I thought that we’d at least address the false perception that people had that an electric car had to be ugly and slow and boring like a golf cart.”

Google did invest in SpaceX, joining with Fidelity to put a total of $1 billion into Musk’s space venture earlier this year.

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