At the time of Tesla’s IPO 15 years ago, the company had generated roughly $150 million in revenue in its lifetime. That came almost entirely from the Roadster, a two-seat electric sportscar that boasted a range of 236 miles on a single charge.

The Model S sedan was still in the lab, two years away from hitting the market.

“The Model S, which is planned to compete in the premium vehicle market, is intended to have a significantly broader customer base than the Tesla Roadster,” the company said in its IPO filing, ahead of its planned $226 million offering.

A bet on Tesla, which debuted on the Nasdaq on June 29, 2010, was a wager on CEO Elon Musk’s ability to develop a roster of mass-market electric cars and scale an automaker far away from the Detroit auto hub, focusing instead on Silicon Valley, home to much of the world’s top tech talent.

Musk didn’t start Tesla, but he invested early, served as chairman and took over as CEO in October 2008, after leading a board revolt against founding CEO and inventor Martin Eberhard early that year.

An investor who put $10,000 into Tesla’s stock at the time of the company’s IPO and held onto all those shares would now own a stake worth close to $3 million. A similar investment at the time in the S&P 500 would have resulted in holdings worth about $57,000.

Far removed from its days as an experimental clean-tech startup led by a member of the “PayPal mafia,” Tesla is now the eighth most-valuable publicly traded U.S. company, with a market cap of over $1 trillion after nearly hitting $100 billion in revenue last year.

The Roadster is largely in the history books, and the Model S is no longer of great importance to the company’s bottom line. Rather, it’s Tesla’s top-selling Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedan, along with sales of environmental regulatory credits, that helped define the company’s financial success over the past decade.

But for the 54-year-old Musk (his birthday was Saturday), now the world’s wealthiest person, that’s the past. He’s told investors that the reason to buy and own Tesla stock from here has almost nothing to do with selling cars to consumers.

“If somebody doesn’t believe Tesla’s going to solve autonomy, I think they should not be an investor in the company,” Musk said on an earnings call in April of last year. He added, “We will, and we are.”

Two months after that, Musk said his company’s Optimus humanoid robots that he hopes some day will perform like R2-D2 and C-3PO in Star Wars, could some day lift Tesla’s market cap to $25 trillion.

Musk, who last year characterized himself as “pathologically optimistic,” has said he expects thousands of Optimus robots to be working in Tesla factories by the end of 2025, and that the company will begin selling the robot next year.

As for autonomy, Tesla currently lags behind Alphabet’s Waymo, which is operating public robotaxi services in several U.S. markets, and Baidu’s Apollo Go in China. Tesla’s Robotaxi just launched a very limited pilot service in Austin, Texas, earlier this month, and said Friday it had completed its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer.

While Tesla still has its share of fanatics and a largely bullish slate of analysts, Wall Street is skeptical of Musk’s futuristic promises or sees them as baked into the stock price. The stock is down about 20% this year, badly underperforming major U.S. indexes and trailing all of its megacap tech peers. Apple, down 19.7% for the year, is the only one close.

Earlier in June, Tesla’s vice president of Optimus robotics, Milan Kovac, said he’s leaving the company after a nine-year tenure, and Musk more recently fired Omead Afshar, the automaker’s vice president of manufacturing and operations.

Meanwhile, Tesla EV sales have been sluggish in 2025, with automotive revenue suffering a second straight year-over-year decline in the first quarter due to an aging lineup and bustling competition, especially from lower-cost Chinese manufacturers.

New Tesla sales in Europe fell for a fifth straight month in May, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers Association, or ACEA, and Tesla’s newest model, the Cybertruck, has failed to gain significant traction in the U.S. after a series of recalls.

Hovering over Tesla’s business is the unpredictability of Musk.

Long glorified for his business success — through PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, brain tech startup Neuralink and artificial intelligence company xAI, among other pursuits — Musk asserted himself in the political realm last year, when he endorsed Donald Trump for president and subsequently injected nearly $300 million into his campaign and related Republican causes.

Musk spent the first few months of 2025 spearheading President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), slashing the size of the federal government and stripping resources from regulatory agencies, including those tasked with oversight of his companies.

But his pivot to politics came at a cost, at least in the short term.

Musk’s vocal and financial support of Trump, endorsement of Germany’s far-right AfD party and extended string of charged and divisive remarks and gestures, including on his social network X and in press appearances, has been correlated with declines in Tesla’s reputation, and a drop in his overall favorability, according to polling data.

“Unless Tesla can come up with a whole range of new products that will really excite consumers, and unless they can mitigate some of the antagonism caused by their leader, they will be seen as past their peak and will begin to go down,” David Haigh, CEO of research and consulting firm Brand Finance, said in January.

Brand Finance’s data showed that the value of Tesla’s brand fell by 26% in 2024, a second straight annual decline. That was before Musk’s time working in the second Trump administration.

Musk’s official tenure in Washington, D.C., ended earlier in June, just as his relationship with the president was souring. Shares of Tesla fell 14% on June 5, as President Trump threatened to pull government contracts for Musk‘s companies, escalating a war of words over the president’s spending bill.

Musk temporarily slowed his posting about politics on social media after that, and appeared to focus more on promoting his businesses. But this weekend he resumed attacking portions of the bill that would hamper solar and renewable energy companies, including Tesla.

Whether Musk is now focused enough to solve Tesla’s problems and, even if he is, whether that’s a big catalyst for the company, is very much up in the air.

Musk and Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Tesla investors have learned that volatility is a big part of the story, and has been since the company’s stock market debut. On more than 40 occasions in the past 15 years, Tesla’s stock has gained or lost at least 20% in a single month.

Here are the three best and worst months for the stock and what happened to cause these hefty moves:

In Tesla’s best month on record, the stock jumped 81%. The company for the first time reported a quarterly profit, albeit a very narrow one. It didn’t mark a sudden turn to profitability, as Tesla continued to lose money until 2018. But sales of Model S cars topped estimates as did revenue from zero emission vehicle (ZEV) credits, which have long been a boon for the company and have sometimes been the difference between a quarter ending in the red or the black.

August 2020

Following a big dip in the early days of the Covid pandemic, Tesla’s stock began an historic rally, leading to an eightfold increase in the stock in 2020, by far its best year on record. Its single best month that year was August, when the share price jumped 74%. Model 3 sales were accelerating rapidly, but much of the momentum was tied to buzz that the company could soon enter the S&P 500, and a pandemic market boom, when retail investors poured into meme stocks, cryptocurrencies and FOMO (fear of missing out) assets. Tesla’s big announcement in August 2020 was a five-for-one stock split, with the share price having soared well past $1,000. Tesla would split its stock again in 2022.

November 2010

Tesla’s 62% rally in its fifth full month as a public company was as much a sign of early volatility as anything else. The next month, the company would lose almost a quarter of its value, wiping out most of those gains. Tesla’s cash position at the end of 2010 was precarious enough that the company warned it may need to raise more money in the future, particularly “if there are delays in the launch of the Model S.” On Nov. 9, 2010, Tesla reported a 31% drop in year-over-year revenue to $31.2 million and a net loss of $35 million. A week earlier, the company said Panasonic had invested $30 million in Tesla through a private placement.

Tesla’s steepest monthly slump on record was a 37% decline to wrap up 2022, which was the worst year for the Nasdaq since the 2008 financial crisis. The company faced a production halt at its Shanghai facility, which was dealing with a fresh onslaught of Covid cases. Musk had been selling Tesla stock in big chunks to fund his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, which he later renamed X.

Musk said on Twitter Spaces on Dec. 22 that he wouldn’t be selling any stock for 18 to 24 months. In a debate with a Tesla shareholder, he pinned Tesla’s declining share price on Federal Reserve rate hikes, writing that “people will increasingly move their money out of stocks into cash, thus causing stocks to drop.” The distraction of the Twitter deal weighed on Tesla shares, and Musk also frustrated some shareholders by borrowing personnel from the Tesla Autopilot team to work on his social media company’s technology.

February 2025

What was supposed to be a honeymoon period for Tesla, thanks to Trump’s return to the White House, turned into a massive selloff, with the stock plummeting 28% in February. In its earnings report in late January, Tesla said automotive revenue sank 8% from a year earlier and the company reported a 23% drop in operating income. Tesla cited reduced average selling prices across its Model 3, Model Y, Model S and Model X lines as a major reason for the decline. Investors also worried about impending tariffs on goods and materials coming from Canada and Mexico, where some of its key suppliers are based. With Musk ramping up his political rhetoric, new vehicle registrations dropped in Europe, plummeting in Germany by around 60% in January from a year earlier.

January 2024

The beginning of 2024 was almost as bad for Tesla, with the stock tumbling 25% to open the year. The company reported revenue and profit for the fourth quarter that trailed estimates, partly because of steep price cuts around the world. Tesla warned that volume growth in 2024 “may be notably lower” than in 2023, and cautioned investors that it was “currently between two major growth waves.”

There were countless other monumental moments for Tesla along the way and, had Musk gotten his wish in 2018, the IPO anniversary may have never taken place.

“Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured,” Musk infamously tweeted in August of that year. Tesla’s stock trading was initially halted and shares were volatile for weeks. A take-private never occurred.

The SEC investigated and charged Musk with civil securities fraud as a result of the tweets. Tesla and Musk struck a revised settlement agreement in 2019 over those charges. The agreement forced Musk to temporarily relinquish his role as chairman of the Tesla board, a position that’s now held by Robyn Denholm.

WATCH: No bad news is great news for Tesla robotaxi debut

For years, France’s Eutelsat has been trying to build a European alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service.

The company merged with British satellite venture OneWeb in 2023, consolidating the region’s satellite communications industry in an effort to catch up to Starlink, which is owned by SpaceX.

Last week, the French state led a 1.35-billion-euro ($1.58 billion) investment in Eutelsat, making it the company’s biggest shareholder with a roughly 30% stake.

Europe largely lags behind the U.S. in the global space race. Starlink’s constellation of over 7,000 satellites dwarfs Eutelsat’s. Meanwhile, Europe’s launch capabilities are more limited than the U.S. The region still relies heavily on America for certain launch services, which is a market dominated by SpaceX.

Eutelsat currently has a market capitalization of 1.6 billion euros, much lower than estimates for Starlink owner SpaceX’s value, which was pegged at $350 billion in a secondary share sale last year. In 2020, analysts at Morgan Stanley said that they see Starlink growing to $80.9 billion in their “base case valuation” for the firm.

Luke Kehoe, industry analyst at network monitoring firm Ookla, said France’s investment in Eutelsat shows the country “is now treating Eutelsat less like a commercial telco and more like a dual-use critical-infrastructure provider” and a “strategic asset” in the European Union’s push for technological sovereignty.

However, building a European competitor to Starlink will be no mean feat.

Relations between the U.S. and Ukraine soured following the election of President Donald Trump and reports surfaced that U.S. negotiators had raised the possibility of cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink.

Germany set up 1,000 Eutelsat terminals in Ukraine in April with the aim of providing an alternative — rather than a replacement — for Starlink’s 50,000 terminals in the war-torn country.

Since then, U.S.-Ukraine tensions have somewhat cooled, and Starlink remains the primary satellite broadband provider to the Ukrainian military.

Eutelsat’s former CEO Eva Berneke has herself admitted that the company cannot yet match Starlink’s scale.

“If we were to take over the entire connectivity capacity for Ukraine and all the citizens — we wouldn’t be able to do that. Let’s just be very honest,” she said in an April interview with Politico.

Berneke was replaced as CEO in May by Jean-Francois-Fallacher, a former executive of French telecoms giant Orange.

“Eutelsat’s higher altitude satellites are leveraged for specialized use cases, such as polar coverage for companies and research facilities in remote regions like Greenland and Alaska,” said Joe Vaccaro, vice president and general manager at Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence unit.

Looking ahead, Eutelsat said it plans to “build upon its operation improvements” with a “differentiated go-to-market model” and “strong European anchoring.” It also noted that the U.K. government could also increase its investment in Eutelsat “in due course.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the automaker completed its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer, routing a Model Y SUV from the company’s Austin, Texas, Gigafactory to an apartment building in the area on June 27.

The Tesla account on social network X, which is also owned by Musk, shared a video overnight showing the Model Y traversing public roads in Austin, including highways, with no human in the driver’s seat or front passenger seat of the car.

Tesla did not say which version of its software and hardware had been installed and used in the car shown in the clip — or if and when that technology would be commercially available to its customers.

A Model Y owners’ manual, available on the Tesla website, says that in order to use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option — which is the company’s most advanced, partially automated driving system available today — owners must keep their hands on the wheel, and remain ready to take over steering or braking at any time.

The vehicle in Tesla’s video was shown operating without a driver on the highway, passing through residential streets and around parking lots before arriving and stopping for a handoff to a customer. The buyer was waiting by the curb at an apartment building alongside Tesla employees, some sporting logo-emblazoned shirts. (The curb was painted red, indicating it is a no-stop fire lane.)

In 2016, Tesla shared an Autopilot video — known as the “Paint It Black” video — that had been staged in a manner which exaggerated its cars self-driving capabilities, depositions later revealed.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating Tesla over possible safety defects in their FSD systems, and recently sought more information from the company about its robotaxi debut after its cars were seen violating some traffic rules. 

In posts on X on Friday, Musk wrote: “The first fully autonomous delivery of a Tesla Model Y from factory to a customer home across town, including highways, was just completed a day ahead of schedule!! Congratulations to the @Tesla_AI teams, both software & AI chip design!”

He also wrote, “There were no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any point. FULLY autonomous! To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous drive with no people in the car or remotely operating the car on a public highway.”

Musk’s claim about the “first fully autonomous drive” on a public highway was not accurate. Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is already operating commercial robotaxi services across multiple U.S. cities, has been offering employees fully autonomous rides on Phoenix freeways since 2024, and has since expanded those rides to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Head of AI at Tesla, Ashok Elluswamy, said in posts on X that the automaker “literally chose a random customer who ordered a Model Y in the Austin area” to participate. He also said the vehicle delivered is “exactly the same as every Model Y produced in the Tesla factory.”

Elluswamy also noted in a post on X that the Model Y in the driverless delivery traveled at a “max speed of 72 mph.” Most highways in Texas have a maximum speed limit of 70 miles per hour, according to the Texas Department of Transportation website.

Separately, Tesla began a robotaxi pilot program in Austin last weekend involving 10 to 20 of its Model Y SUVs equipped with technology, about which Tesla has revealed little to the public.

The Tesla robotaxi service is available only to select, invited riders who have mostly been influencers and analysts, many of whom generate income by posting Tesla-fan content on platforms like X and YouTube. The Tesla robotaxi vehicles run with a human safety supervisor on board in the front passenger seat, and are remotely supervised by employees in an operations center.

Since 2016, Musk has been promising that Tesla would soon be able to turn all of its existing EVs into fully autonomous vehicles with a simple, over-the-air software update. In his Master Plan, Part Deux, he outlined a future where every Tesla owner would be able to add their car to a “Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app,” enabling their car to generate income for them while they sleep.

In 2019, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020 — a claim that helped him raise $2 billion at the time from institutional investors.

While Tesla has not fulfilled those promises thus far, the driverless delivery in Texas this week has elicited excitement among believers in Musk and his vision.

Meanwhile, Tesla is battling a brand backlash in response to the CEO’s often incendiary political rhetoric, his endorsements of Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD, and his work for the Trump administration.

Tesla sales have declined year-over-year in key markets, especially throughout Europe, in the first five months of 2025 partly as a result of that backlash. The company is also facing increased competition from EV makers, particularly Chinese brands such as BYD, Nio and Xiaomi, offering more affordable and newer models.

Tesla is expected to disclose its second-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers on July 2.