Souls themselves did not think that Tesla would live. Analysts told it to go away, short sellers gambled billions of dollars betting that it would, and legacy automakers stood with quiet confidence and hoped that the entire experiment would fall on its own aspiration. Then something out of the ordinary occurred. The most valuable automotive manufacturer never made a regular annual profit, illustrating how one man’s belief changed Wall Street’s rules in the auto industry.
The Believer
Elon Musk did not enter Tesla merely as a passive investor; he joined the company as a fervent advocate, convinced that humanity had made a grave mistake in favoring the internal combustion engine and that this could be rectified. This foundational belief shaped every product decision, all financial risks taken, and the public statements made over two pivotal decades in the American automotive landscape.
Roadster First
The plan by Tesla was staged out in sequence: introduce an expensive, low sales sports car to demonstrate the possibility of making electric vehicles desirable, and then use that credibility and capital raised to finance mass production. The Roadster did not intend to climb. It was intended to make a total transformation in the cultural dialogue on electric cars, and it did so.
Model S Moment
The 2012 Model S marked a turning point for Tesla, showcasing an electric car with a 265-mile range, a seventeen-inch touchscreen, and superior performance to European sports cars, demonstrating the potential of electric vehicles to American customers.
Gigafactory Bet
Tesla announced the Nevada Gigafactory in 2014, aiming for an unprecedented building size and a factory to produce more lithium-ion batteries annually than the entire industry combined. The majority of the analysts termed it a fantasy. The Gigafactory turned out to be the base of manufacturing that facilitated the economic viability of Tesla production on a mass scale.
Model 3 Changes Everything
The Tesla Model 3 was the company’s most significant product, with a starting price of $35,000, a range of 220 miles, and 400,000 pre-orders before production. This confirmed the mass market demand Musk had claimed, easing Wall Street’s doubts as reservations continued to rise.
Short Seller War
Tesla had the largest short position in American market history, with billions bet against it. Musk reacted confrontationally, tweeting about taking the company private at $420 per share. The brief squeeze became one of Wall Street’s most painful incidents.
S&P 500 Entry
A major event in Tesla’s history was its addition to the S&P 500 Index in December 2020, which forced American index funds to buy Tesla shares, causing a historic stock surge and making it a core component in millions of Americans’ retirement portfolios.
Master Plan
In 2006, Musk made the first public publication of his Tesla Master Plan, a transparently sequenced runway to the clean energy system and specifically a premium sports car to an affordable mass market vehicle. Being the first company to release the long-term strategy publicly was a countercultural step that created unprecedented trust in the public and provided the core American shareholders of Tesla with the belief system that cuts across the years of turbulence.
Energy Vision
Tesla to Musk was never a car company; it has been an energy company. Tesla now had an acquisition in the form of SolarCity, a Powerwall home battery under development, and utility-scale Megapack storage systems with a global clean energy transition worth billions to the world that was becoming part of the portfolio of the American institutional investors.
Trillion Dollar Club
As of October 2021, Tesla became the first company, alongside Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, to exceed a market cap of one trillion dollars. In 2008, a company near bankruptcy, with the largest short position on Wall Street, was worth more than the nine biggest automakers combined.
