Tesla went public having built one car, a two-seat electric Roadster powered by thousands of laptop-style battery cells. It was 2010. Detroit had just come out of bankruptcy and bailouts, and most people thought electric cars were slow and dull. Tesla had borrowed $465 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build a family sedan, the Model S. Its filing asked investors to bet that a small Silicon Valley startup could make cars at scale.

Batteries Before Brakes

Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning started Tesla in 2003, naming it after the inventor Nikola Tesla. Elon Musk led the first big funding round and became chairman. A legal settlement later let Musk, JB Straubel, and Ian Wright also call themselves founders. The plan was simple to state and hard to do. Start with an expensive sports car for rich buyers. Use that money to build a cheaper sedan. Then use the sedan to build a car for everyone.

Seventeen Dollars a Share

Tesla priced its IPO at $17 a share on June 28, 2010, and began trading on Nasdaq the next day. The stock opened at $19 and closed at $23.89, a gain of about 40 percent. The Model S arrived in 2012. The Model 3 followed, and Tesla grew into the most valuable carmaker in the world. It moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to Austin, Texas, and still trades on Nasdaq as TSLA.

Cover: The Storm, George Inness. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a gathering storm (electric charge).