Investor's Corner
Tesla celebrates its 10-year IPO anniversary: A look back at TSLA’s storied decade
Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) recently celebrated its 10th year anniversary at the stock market. Since the company held its initial public offering, TSLA stock has been on a massive bull run, earning its investors about 45% a year on average. That’s quite impressive, especially for a company that entered one of the most competitive industries in the market using vehicles that were once thought of as nothing but glorified golf carts.
Tesla held its IPO on June 29, 2010. During the time, Tesla was in need of funding, and its entrance into the stock market provided the company with a much needed boost to get its rhythm going. Tesla’s IPO was priced at $17, which valued the company at about $1.7 billion. Since then, TSLA stock has aggressively risen, with the company breaching the $1,000 per share barrier this month.
Overall, steep swings due to its trademark volatility aside, Tesla stock has earned investors 5,677% over the past decade. That’s an average of about 45% per year, quite an achievement for a company that is ranked among the world’s automakers.
Today, Tesla is valued only second to Toyota in the car industry. Of course, Toyota far outsells the much smaller Tesla, with the Japanese auto giant selling about 9 million vehicles each year with sales of about $234 billion. Tesla, on the other hand, sold over 360,000 vehicles last year with about $26 billion in sales. But these numbers alone miss the big picture.
A look at Tesla’s pace of growth over the decade shows a company that is expanding fast. Back in 2010, Tesla sales came in at less than $120 million and it was built on the back of the original Roadster, a small sports car that was priced beyond $100,000 per unit. Over the past ten years, these sales numbers are up by a factor of more than 200, as per Barron’s. Toyota, on the other round, has grown too, but nowhere near as much, with the Japanese automaker’s sales coming in at about $200 billion in 2010.
This is not to say that Tesla has not met challenges over the past decade, of course. Electric cars are a hard sell to begin with, and the negative sentiments surrounding the vehicles themselves were prominent, from the long tailpipe myth to range anxiety. Tesla was able to address these largely with the Model S, its first vehicle that was designed from the ground up. The Model S was well-reviewed, at one point even being dubbed as the 2013 MotorTrend Car of the Year.
If there is something that Tesla has shown, it would be foresight. Even if it only had the Model S, the company already began setting up a Supercharger Network that would allow its vehicles to charge their batteries quickly and conveniently. This allowed Tesla owners to conduct long trips without much issue, something that was rarely possible with previous electric cars.
The company also established a Gigafactory in Nevada in anticipation of the arrival of the Model 3, its first mass market car. The idea of a mammoth factory that only produces electric car batteries and powertrains seemed like a questionable idea then, and it was met by critics’ vocal opposition, but it ultimately paid off as the Model 3 hit its stride in the United States and in other countries.
Tesla today is at a very different place compared to where it was when it debuted in the stock market. Today, Tesla stands as the gold standard of EVs, and its always-connected, tech-driven vehicles are now being emulated by the world’s largest automakers such as Volkswagen. Elon Musk has always stated that Tesla’s goal is to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy, and so far, the company appears to be doing just that. Ultimately, Tesla has done the near impossible: it was able to disrupt the auto market.
Tesla shares are up more than 130% year to date as of the company’s 10-year IPO anniversary yesterday, surpassing comparable returns of the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
As of writing, Tesla stock is up 1.43% at $1,023.77 per share.
Disclosure: I have no ownership in shares of TSLA and have no plans to initiate any positions within 72 hours.
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Tesla Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is currently listed as a Level 2 suite in terms of its passenger cars. As its Robotaxi platform continues to move quickly, it has been recognized as a Level 4 ride-sharing program by the State of Texas, as Tesla recently self-certified itself.
However, a Wall Street analyst is arguing that Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has effectively achieved Level 4 autonomy in most conditions in all of its vehicles, drawing on personal experience and data released by the company.
Alex Potter of Piper Sandler said in a note to investors on Wednesday that “Tesla has solved the self-driving puzzle,” pointing to decisions to offer insurance discounts for FSD-enabled policies as a signal of confidence, which is backed up by stellar safety records compared to human driving.
Investing.com initially reported on Potter’s new note.
Additionally, Potter looks at the recent start of Cybercab production at Giga Texas as a potential indication that Tesla is ready to offer some level of unsupervised driving at least in the near future. The Cybercab has no steering wheel or pedals, completely eliminating the ability for human input.
He also sees Tesla’s allocation of “several hundred million USD (if not $1B+)” as confidence internally, seeing as it would be tough to set aside that amount of capital toward a project that the company does not see as relatively near-term.
Forward thinking, especially as Cybercab has no human controls, it would make sense that Tesla is at least close to self-driving. How close is another question.
Tesla has routinely teased that unsupervised FSD is close, but there are still a lot of things it feels as if the company has to roll out some more capability, including unsupervised parking features, known as “Banish,” better operation with regional self-driving performance, and other improvements.
That is not to say that Tesla FSD is super impressive already. It has already completed coast-to-coast drives across the United States and Canada, it routinely takes the stress out of driving for most people, and it has proven through Tesla Safety Reports that it is safer and involved in accidents less frequently than humans.
🚨 These are the first-ever FSD safety statistics out of the Netherlands, showing it was over 3.5x safer than human driving on Dutch roads.
The most recent numbers out of Tesla for North America show:
-Over 5.5 million miles between accidents for Teslas using FSD
-660k miles… https://t.co/XKlRzgSGEh pic.twitter.com/HX6kzh0ZKc— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 9, 2026
Even Potter believes it is capable, as he used it to go from Missoula, Montana, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, back in April.
“There’s no substitute for personal experience,” he wrote.
Investor's Corner
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s Model Y just became South Korea’s best-selling car, beating every domestic model in May.
Tesla did something last month that no foreign car has ever done in South Korea by outselling every vehicle in the country, domestic or imported, finishing the month with Model Y as the single best-selling car across the entire Korean market. According to data from the Korea Automobile Importers and Distributors Association released on June 4, the Model Y recorded 8,762 units sold in May, pushing the Kia Sorento into second place at 7,836 units and the Hyundai Grandeur into third at 5,183 units. It is the first time an imported vehicle has outsold every domestic model on a single-month basis.
Tesla imported 10,866 cars into South Korea in May, making it the top import brand for the fourth consecutive month. BMW followed at 6,555 units, less than two-thirds of Tesla’s total, while BYD registered just 1,032 units. The combined domestic sales of GM Korea, Renault Korea, and KG Mobility last month totaled just 7,019 units, meaning a single Tesla model outsold three Korean automakers combined.
Tesla FSD earns high praise in South Korea’s real-world autonomous driving test
South Korea has historically been one of the hardest markets for foreign automakers to crack. Hyundai and Kia together control close to 70% of the overall market and carry deep consumer loyalty built over decades. Tesla’s path into this market was an uphill battle due to high import duties, limited service infrastructure, and early skepticism about charging networks. In 2024, the Model Y was the best-selling imported car in South Korea with 18,717 units for the full year. By 2025, after the Juniper refresh, it cleared 50,000 units and took the top spot among all EVs.
Year to date, Tesla has a 250.8% increase in the country over the same period last year, and now holds a 30.8% share of the entire imported car segment for 2026. EVs as a category represented 48.6% of all imported passenger car registrations in May. As Teslarati has reported, the Juniper refresh brought meaningful improvements to range, interior quality, and ride refinement that addressed the most common criticisms of earlier Model Y versions. Those upgrades appear to be resonating in markets like South Korea where buyers compare Tesla directly against high end domestic competitors.
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla stuns with another FSD approval in Europe, its second in two days
