- Elon Musk has painted this world
of electric cars that can drive themselves,
but if he couldn't keep the company afloat,
then was Tesla going to be able to survive long enough
for Elon Musk to deliver this vision.
- [Narrator] Less than a year ago,
things looked bleak for Tesla,
when shares dropped below $200.
But, in just seven short months,
CEO Elon Musk has turned the company
into the most valuable U.S automaker of all time.
So, how did the embattled founder
get back to delivering the impossible for his shareholders?
- 2017 and 2018 were largely a trip through hell
for Elon Musk and Tesla.
Things didn't work out as planned.
- [Elon Musk] Boring, bonehead questions are not cool.
Next.
- [Joe Rogan] It's tobacco and marijuana in there.
That's all it is.
- Today, the SEC filed securities fraud charges
against Elon Musk, stemming from his August 7th, 2018
statements that he was considering taking Tesla private.
- [Narrator] These image problems for Musk
were compounded by production issues for Tesla.
Model 3 deliveries were delayed
and the promised $35,000 price tag was never met.
- He had very ambitious targets
to build the Model 3 compact car in California,
and it turned out way harder than he expected,
in part because of Elon Musk's vision for automation.
He talked about an idea of being able to turn the lights off
and let the robots do their work.
Well, the plan and the vision
turned out to be much more complicated
than anyone anticipated or at least he anticipated.
- [Narrator] Then, on day one of 2019,
U.S. customers were hit with an effective price increase
to buy any Tesla.
The federal tax credit for electric vehicles was cut in half
as part of a planned year-long phase out.
- The company announced it was lowering the vehicle's price
because it was essentially trying to counteract
that effective price increase.
Some took that as a sign that Tesla perhaps had peaked
at the number of customers in the U.S.
willing or able to afford that higher-price Model 3.
- [Narrator] A week later, Tesla started construction
of a new factory in China, the country's first
entirely foreign-owned car plant without any local partners.
- China's the world's largest auto market,
huge consumer of electric vehicles and luxury vehicles,
so, in a lot of ways, a really good place for Tesla to play.
- We're incredibly excited to break ground
on the Shanghai Gigafactory.
- Elon promised that, by the end of the year,
the factory would be up and running
and they would be building cars.
That was a remarkable promise to make,
and a lot of close auto industry observers
really questioned if that was gonna be possible,
thinking that perhaps this was yet again
another overly ambitious target
that Elon Musk was setting for the company
and that in reality it would probably take much longer.
- [Narrator] First quarter sales were worse than expected,
beginning the year with a loss
just months after Musk ensured shareholders
that Tesla would be profitable
every quarter into the future, short of a disaster.
- Analysts looked at it, and they really began to wonder
what the demand level was like here in the U.S.
Some of the older vehicles, like the Model S and the Model X
had been the underpinning of the company's business,
and if demand was falling off for those vehicles,
that would raise questions about
the financial house that Tesla had built.
- [Narrator] The stock continued to fall,
and in early June Tesla closed at just under $179 per share,
the company's lowest closing price of 2019.
- So the third quarter, we're starting to see
the fruits of Tesla's labor.
They've been working to get the Model 3s
to Europe and into China.
And a turning point for Tesla in 2019
was really the announcement of a surprise profit,
and the company started looking like,
well, maybe they are on the right track
and a return to a story of potential growth.
(audience cheering)
- [Narrator] At the end of November,
Musk revealed Tesla's long-awaited Cybertruck,
the world's first electric pickup truck.
- Doesn't look like anything else.
(audience laughing)
- [Tim] As the event began to unfold,
they were talking about features that
really you don't normally talk about in a new car
such as windows that were bulletproof.
And so, onstage, Elon and his people
were making a demonstration of this,
and they got these metal balls.
- Sure?
- [Elon] Yeah.
(smashes window)
Oh my God! (crowd oohing)
- This like unheard of,
that you normally don't see a CEO onstage
with such a colossal demonstration gone awry.
So the next day, you might think the stock might go down,
but in fact you're seeing huge conversations
about this vehicle.
- [Narrator] Just days later, Musk tweeted
that more than 250,000 people
had placed pre-orders for a Cybertruck.
- From there, something interesting happened.
It returned the conversation to the future of Tesla.
It was always what had they done today
and why were they struggling to get these cars out,
and what Musk had been able to do
is put the conversation yet again to this new vision
of what he was promising for personal transportation.
(upbeat dance music) (crowd cheering)
- [Narrator] Exactly a year after breaking ground
at the Shanghai factory, Tesla held a press conference
to announce their first deliveries
of China-made Model 3s to Chinese customers.
The car maker also confirmed it had met
another of Musk's seemingly impossible goals:
delivering at least 360,000 electric vehicles in 2019.
- The surprise here was that Elon
delivered on what he'd promised,
something that he'd struggled in the past,
but here he was executing,
something that really enthused investors,
because if he could deliver on these promises,
what other promises could he deliver on?
- [Narrator] Tesla just reported another profitable quarter,
but the future is still uncertain.
The company has yet to deliver a full-year profit,
and it's unclear how long success in China will last.
The entire Chinese car market
has been falling steadily for two years,
and demand for electric vehicles
has declined for the past few months.
- There's still a question
about whether Tesla got into China
a little bit too late, if the party might be over,
so one of the things that Tesla's
gonna face here in the coming months is,
what's the demand for its vehicles?
(soft piano music)