The Cybertruck Era

Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck in November 2019 with a stainless-steel body and a demo that famously cracked its supposedly unbreakable window on stage. It took four more years -- and several redesigns -- before deliveries actually began, in November 2023. By then, most major North American automakers had agreed to adopt Tesla's charging connector as a new industry standard, a rare case of a Tesla-specific technology becoming everyone else's default.

The years since have been less triumphant. Tesla cut 10 percent of its global workforce in April 2024 and moved its state of incorporation from Delaware to Texas that June, after a Delaware court voided a $56 billion pay package for Musk in early 2024 over insufficient board process -- a ruling the board would spend the next two years trying to route around with a new package instead. In October 2024, Tesla unveiled the Cybercab and Robovan concepts and outlined plans for a robotaxi network, betting the company's future on autonomy rather than incremental car sales.

By early 2025, Tesla's European sales and share price were both sliding, with analysts and journalists linking the decline directly to Musk's political activity and his ties to the far right. The competitive picture darkened too: in January 2026, Chinese automaker BYD passed Tesla as the world's largest seller of battery-electric vehicles, moving roughly 2.26 million battery-electric cars in 2025 against Tesla's 1.64 million. Weeks later, Musk announced Tesla would discontinue the Model S and Model X entirely in the second quarter of 2026, redirecting manufacturing capacity toward its Optimus humanoid robot program -- ending the production run of the two models that had carried Tesla out of near-bankruptcy in the first place.

It is not, on the numbers, an unambiguous success story anymore -- and that is arguably the most honest place to end a company history that started with two engineers and a borrowed prototype. Tesla forced the entire auto industry to take electric cars seriously; whether it can hold the lead it created is now a genuinely open question.