People who paid $50K to reserve a Roadster would have made bank investing that in Tesla stock instead

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is about to pull the wraps off the second-generation Roadster — again.

It’s been nine years since Elon Musk said it would revive the Roadster.

Would-be buyers chomped at the bit to grab the two-door, 600-mile-range, high-powered electric car way back in November 2017.

They paid either $50,000 to reserve a spot in the car’s queue or $250,000 to buy a Founders Series upfront.

Roughly nine years later, the car still hasn’t entered production.

That could change soon, as Tesla is about to unveil the car — now apparently with cold-gas thrusters that might allow it to temporarily hover — on Thursday night.

That raised an expensive question: What if early Roadster buyers had put that money into Tesla stock instead?

So we did some back-of-the-napkin math to figure it out.

Tesla shares closed at about $21 on November 17, 2017, the first trading day after Musk unveiled the car.

At roughly $360 in mid-October 2026, a $50,000 investment made in 2017 would now be worth between $850,000 and $900,000.

That’s a gain of more than $800,000, before taxes and trading fees.

A buyer who put down the full $250,000 for a limited Founders Series Roadster would be sitting on roughly $4.3 million in Tesla stock today, a gain of about $4 million.

The long wait for the Roadster’s deliveries has not gone unnoticed by Musk.

During an October 2025 earnings call, he thanked the vehicle’s “long-suffering” deposit holders, while saying the car company had focused heavily on its autonomy and robotics ambitions.

The wait has been too much for some big-name shoppers.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (who has a famously fraught relationship with Musk) publicly canceled his reservation in 2025.

YouTuber Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, canceled one of his two reservations after 8 years, saying that Tesla “has been sitting with my 50 grand for eight years and hasn’t done anything with it.” Per Musk’s X thread, the wait might be worth it.

Ahead of the Thursday event, Tesla’s CEO wrote that the reveal will be “a candidate for greatest product demo of all time.”