-132.2% The stock’s rapid 138-fold ascent was mirrored by a nearly 830-fold uptick in revenue and a dramatic improvement in profitability. At the time of its IPO, Tesla was undergoing an ambitious experiment that CEO Elon Musk has since admitted was more likely to fail than succeed. Although hybrid vehicles like Toyota Motor Corp.’s (TM) Prius had been around for some time, they certainly weren’t sports cars and were a far cry from what one might consider luxury vehicles. Mass-producing electric vehicles and making them sexy and desirable was practically a pipe dream, and major automakers neglected the market opportunity, leaving an open lane for Tesla. Unlike the software industry, scaling in the capital-intensive auto industry is difficult and expensive. To make the most of its first-mover advantage, Tesla had to rapidly grow its production capacity, which it did at a prodigious pace: In 2010, the company delivered less than 1,600 Tesla Roadsters, which was then its only vehicle. In 2023, it delivered more than 1.8 million cars across its five current models — Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y and the Cybertruck — none of which existed in 2010. The last dozen-plus years have also seen the company diversify into areas like insurance, charging infrastructure, and energy storage and generation. Its energy business alone generated $6 billion in revenue last year, or more than 51 times the revenue of the entire business in 2010. A Word of Caution What Tesla as a company has done in the last dozen-plus years is nothing short of miraculous, and its stock price has rightfully ballooned along with profits. And while it’s a nice thought experiment to see what a $10,000 investment in Tesla at its IPO would be worth today, choosing these diamonds in the rough on Wall Street is exceedingly difficult to do in practice. First, IPOs are infamously bad times to buy. Companies will seek the highest valuation they can when going public, and newly public stocks tend to underperform the larger market in the short and medium term. Second, it’s just not easy to pick market-beating stocks. A May 2018 paper from Hendrik Bessembinder at Arizona State University found that between 1926 and 2016, the best-performing 4% of public stocks accounted for the entire net gain in the U.S. stock market. The other 96% collectively matched the return of U.S. Treasury bills. Finally, to reap the enormous rewards an early Tesla investor would be sitting on today, you’d have to keep the faith and hold as the EV innovator lost money year after year for a full decade. It wasn’t until 2020 that Tesla turned its first full-year profit. If you’re one of the lucky few to have held firm on Tesla throughout the years, kudos! For everyone else, the hunt for the best stocks to buy now lives on. More from U.S. News