Tesla Stock Up 120% in Past 5 Years

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Dec 26, 9:15AM EST

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Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA) stock recently reached an all-time high and has outperformed the broader market over the past five years.
Investor optimism centers on Tesla becoming a leader in self-driving taxis and robotics.

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Tesla Stock Up 120% in Past 5 Years — © Deemerwha studio / Shutterstock.com

Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ: TSLA | TSLA Price Prediction) stock recently reached an all-time high. After wavering earlier this year, it is up 120% over the past five years. That compares to the S&P 500’s gain of 87% in that time. This is despite slow sales, battles over CEO Elon Musk’s pay package, electric vehicle (EV) competition, and safety concerns about some of its models. Investors still believe Tesla’s future is as something more than a car company. In fact, much of the five-year increase happened in the second half of 2025.

There is only one explanation for the success of the shares. People and institutions that own the stock believe that Musk’s vision of a future in which its primary businesses are fully self-driving cars and robotics will make it a global artificial intelligence (AI) leader.

Musk has made believers of what must be tens of thousands of shareholders with his story that there will be 40 million human-like robots in 2040. The price of these could be less than $20,000. That makes it hard to see how these could be affordable in the world’s poor countries.

While Tesla has many competitors in the autonomous car business, Musk says it will be the worldwide leader. That means his service will need to be better than several in the United States, including Alphabet’s Waymo. The New York Times recently reported, “Shares of Tesla have hit new highs on optimism about the company’s self-driving taxis. But experts say Tesla is far behind Waymo, which has a big head start.” Several tech and car companies in China also say they have a head start.

Most car industry experts do believe self-driving cars are the future of the auto and trucking sectors. How soon and who wins are part of an ongoing debate that will be settled by the market share of the companies already far along in the business.

Often missing in the debate is that some legacy car company stocks have done nearly as well as Tesla over the past five years. General Motors Co. (NYSE: GM) stock is up by 102%. Maybe just being a car company is enough to have a strong share price performance.

Tesla Stock Price Prediction and Forecast 2025–2030

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.