Tesla made building a successful EV look easy. It is NOT. Tesla was founded in 2003. It didn’t achieve its first full year of profitability until 2020. That’s nearly two decades of fighting through production hell, raising capital, surviving near-bankruptcy, scaling manufacturing, and solving problems no automaker had solved before. In 2025, Tesla generated roughly $10B in operating income. Meanwhile, Rivian, Lucid, Polestar, and Ford’s EV division all remained $ billions of dollars in the red. Tesla delivered over 1.6 million vehicles in 2025. Rivian delivered about 42,000, Lucid about 16,000, Polestar about 60,000, and Ford’s EV business still lost billions despite much higher overall company scale. You see, building an EV is one thing. Building an EV company that can manufacture at scale, generate billions in operating profit, and stay profitable year after year is something entirely different. To get here, there were years of failures, sleepless nights, engineering breakthroughs, blood, sweat, tears, Elon sleeping on the factory floor, and risks that most companies and CEOs weren’t willing, or able, to take. That’s why, more than 20 years after Tesla was founded, it remains the benchmark everyone else is still chasing. The fact is, the Tesla team has a lot of battle scars that other companies are just now experiencing… building a truly successful EV is a very difficult path.