If you had bought TSLA in 2012 with $10,000...

Tesla designs and manufactures electric vehicles, battery storage and solar products. Founded in 2003, it delivered its first car - the Roadster - in 2008, and its volume came later from the Model 3 and Model Y. The company also sells energy-storage systems and regulatory credits to other automakers, and a meaningful share of its valuation has long rested on projects that are not yet revenue, such as autonomy and robotics. The shares trade on Nasdaq and are members of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. Tesla pays no dividend, so unlike most of the stocks here, its price return and its total return are effectively the same thing.

Tesla went public in June 2010 at seventeen dollars a share. The years that follow divide cleanly: a long stretch of production difficulty and repeated doubts about solvency, particularly during the Model 3 ramp in 2018; the first full year of profitability in 2020, which qualified it for inclusion in the S&P 500 that December; and a 2022 decline of roughly two thirds as rates rose and demand growth slowed. Two splits affect any long-run chart: five-for-one in August 2020 and three-for-one in August 2022, so one pre-2020 share corresponds to fifteen today. This is the asset where an unadjusted historical price is most likely to mislead.

Tesla is the asset most likely to have been sold early. Running a specific year makes the cost of that visible, and the year's high-low range printed with the result is the part worth looking at - it shows the volatility an investor would have had to tolerate to still be holding at the end.