Elon Musk Is Having A Great Day

Its been a huge day for Elon Musk.

Tesla's electric vehicle rivals Nissan and BMW are "keen" on talks with the company to collaborate on charging networks, reports The Financial Times' Henry Foy.

In addition to seeking talks with Tesla on charging networks, Foy's report, citing sources, said the Nissan, BMW and Tesla, "are keen to collaborate on creating possible global vehicle-charging standards."

Following the report, shares of Tesla are up more than 5%. SolarCity, which Tesla CEO Elon Musk serves as the chairman of, is also up 2.5%.

The talks shouldn't come as a complete shock, as Musk last week made the unprecedented decision to make the company's patents available for anybody to use.

In making the company's patents available, Musk argued that the company doesn't need them because the company's real competition isn't other electric carmakers, but cars that run on gasoline.

On a conference call accompanying Musk's announcement, which was made in a company blog post, he said he spoke to BMW the previous day about ditching their patent protections.

Another motivation for spurring further car development, and especially the global vehicle-charging standards mentioned in Foy's report, is Tesla's play to become a major supplier of lithium ion batteries.

Tesla has announced plans to build a gigafactory, which would allow Tesla to make lithium ion batteries for its cars, and will choose a site by the end of the year.

These lithium ion batteries would be for use in Tesla's electric cars as well as power storage units sold by SolarCity.