Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has spent most of the past decade splitting investors into two camps: the ones who think it's the most important company of the century, and the ones who think it's the most overpriced. Right now the bulls have the momentum. The stock has climbed more than 50% off its November 2025 low to the low $400s, putting Tesla's market value back around $1.66 trillion. And almost none of that is about selling cars.
The robotaxi and Optimus bet
Most carmakers trade at a price-to-earnings ratio between 5 and 10. Tesla trades at roughly 400. Nobody is paying that for the Model Y.
They're paying for the robotaxi service Tesla launched in Austin in mid-2025 and has since pushed into Dallas and Houston, with Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas lined up for the first half of this year. Paid robotaxi miles nearly doubled from the prior quarter. They're also paying for Optimus, the humanoid robot Tesla demonstrated running 1,000 units autonomously on a pilot line at Giga Texas in March, even though it's still months from real production. Elon Musk has floated a $10 trillion valuation built on those two products. Tesla itself doesn't expect meaningful robotaxi revenue until 2027.
Tesla's first-quarter 2026 numbers
The car business underneath all that is doing fine, not spectacular. Tesla reported $22.39 billion in revenue for the first quarter, up 16% year over year, with net income of $477 million and non-GAAP earnings of $0.41 a share, up 52%. Gross margin widened to 21.1% from 16.3% a year earlier.
Deliveries were the soft spot. Tesla built 408,386 vehicles in the quarter and delivered 358,023, a gap of more than 50,000 cars that pushed inventory to 27 days of supply, up from 15 at the end of 2025. CFO Vaibhav Taneja told analysts that capital spending in 2026 will top $25 billion, about three times what the company spent last year, as Tesla leans into AI and its robotaxi build-out.
If you invested $1,000 in Tesla 10 years ago
Tesla went public in June 2010 at $17 a share, the first American carmaker to go public since Ford in 1956. Two stock splits later (5-for-1 in 2020 and 3-for-1 in 2022), its price in mid-2016 works out to about $14.88 on a split-adjusted basis.
Using Stoculator's stock calculator, $1,000 invested in Tesla on May 31, 2016 would be worth $28,859.11 as of May 29, 2026. That's an annual return rate of 39.97% and a total return of 2,785.91%. Your $1,000 would have bought roughly 67 shares now worth about $429 each, and since Tesla pays no dividend, all of it came from the rising share price.
You can use Stoculator's calculator to check the numbers for different periods and investment amounts.
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