Markets & Business
Tesla builds its 10 millionth electric vehicle
Tesla says it has built its 10 millionth electric vehicle, a milestone reached six years after its one millionth car and one that puts the company halfway toward a production goal tied to CEO Elon Musk's $1 trillion pay package.
Tesla announced the milestone in a social media post early Thursday. Musk’s pay package, approved by shareholders last year, unlocks its full value only if Tesla hits four “product goals” by 2035: building 20 million vehicles, reaching 10 million active subscriptions for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, delivering 1 million “bots,” and putting 1 million robotaxis on the road. Of those four, the vehicle-production goal is the one Tesla is closest to achieving.
Still, reaching 20 million by 2035 is not guaranteed. Despite a stretch of rapid growth driven by the Model 3 and Model Y, Tesla has not sold 2 million vehicles in a single year, and if it keeps up that pace — or slows further — it will take the company until at least the early 2030s to reach 20 million. Musk once promised 20 million cars a year by 2030, but abandoned that target a few years ago as sales slowed.
Tesla faces less EV competition in the US now that major automakers have pulled back and startups like Rivian and Lucid Motors have struggled to scale, but the company is still struggling in its home market: US sales fell 13% year-over-year in the second quarter, pushing Tesla to court buyers in newer markets like Japan, Australia, and Lithuania.
On the other three product goals, Tesla recently reported just shy of 1.5 million FSD subscribers, though it isn’t clear whether that count includes free trials, which would not qualify toward the official goal. The company is still in the earliest stages of building robots and robotaxis.
Musk also must raise Tesla’s adjusted EBITDA to $400 billion by 2035 to unlock the full pay package. That looks challenging today: adjusted EBITDA currently hovers around $3.27 billion and has been shrinking as heavy discounts, the loss of saleable regulatory credits, and rising spending on AI and robotics weigh on the company. The only other automaker at a comparable scale is China’s BYD, which recently crossed 17 million “new energy vehicles” built and sold, roughly half of them hybrids.
Why it matters
Tesla’s production milestone shows how far a single pay package can stretch a company’s targets — and how much distance remains on the harder-to-reach goals of software subscriptions, robots, and profit that determine whether Musk collects the full $1 trillion.