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)