By Al Root

Tesla stock was little changed in early trading on Tuesday as investors digested a couple of numbers.

The first number was 10 billion. Tesla's Full Self-Driving safety page shows that Tesla drivers have accumulated 10.05 billion miles using Tesla's FSD driver assistance product.

The number is symbolic. It's a lot of miles and reflects that hundreds of thousands of Tesla owners let FSD drive the car every day. FSD, as Barron's has pointed out, has improved significantly over the years and is capable of doing most of the driving most of the time.

The FSD system needs to be supervised by the human driver. Tesla CEO Elon Musk hopes that FSD will advance to unsupervised autonomous driving by the end of the year. Achieving that would be a catalyst for Tesla stock, demonstrating that widespread use of truly self-driving cars is just around the corner.

The second number is $1.5 million. That's all Musk will have to pay for failing to disclose his initial 5% stake in Twitter, now X, on time. Musk missed the deadline by 11 days, potentially costing former Twitter holders money. Musk completed the X acquisition in late 2022.

The number is a win for Musk. It doesn't matter much for Tesla shareholders other than to demonstrate that Musk's legal issues rarely rise to investor-level events.

Shares of the electric-vehicle maker were up 0.2% in premarket trading at $393.10 Tuesday, while S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were both up about 0.3%.

Coming into Tuesday trading, Tesla stock was down 13% this year and up 40% over the past 12 months.

Recent declines reflect investors' desire to see more AI-related progress, such as unsupervised FSD. Investors would also like to see progress on robo-taxis.

Tesla launched a robo-taxi service in Austin, Texas, in June. The rollout to additional cities has been slow. Tesla now has robo-taxis in four cities.

Write to Al Root at allen.root@dowjones.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

May 05, 2026 07:06 ET (11:06 GMT)

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