If every person has put down $1k for a preorder, that means in the span of a few days Tesla has pulled in more than $250,000,000. That's a lot of green. I wonder if Musk is celebrating right now, or if he's starting to sweat the realization that he's gonna have to up his production game.
Edit: The goons in the comment section of the link are more entertaining than the article.
They deliberately downplayed the number of pre-orders they were expecting because whatever number they chose, if they didn't beat it by a substantial margin the shorters would hammer the shit out of the stock.
Keep in mind: Tesla's factory used to be NUMMI, which had no difficulty making 400,000 cars per year, and electric cars are substantially less complicated to assemble than internal combustion, so long as you have the batteries, which they do.
Tesla could reasonably be expected to cross a half million cars a year by 2018.