The Companies Where Early Investors Made the Most Money

With OpenAI and SpaceX both preparing to go public this year, a June 2026 report reveals which stocks have made early investors the most money since their IPOs. A new study by online trading platform Taurex ranked the world’s biggest companies by how much their share price has grown since they first went public.

• Early Tesla investors have made more money than anyone, with a $1,000 stake from 2010 now worth over $24K.
• Adobe has quietly outperformed every tech giant over 40 years, turning an $11 IPO share into nearly USD 245.
• Nvidia’s IPO price was just $12 in 1999, the same year the dot-com bubble was inflating, yet it now trades at over $208.

The research tracked the share price of 27 well-known companies from their original IPO date through June 2026. For each company, the report recorded the official offer price on the first day of trading and compared it to the latest closing price. Companies were then ranked by how much their share price has grown since going public, revealing which ones rewarded early investors the most.

Here’s a look at the 10 companies that delivered the biggest returns since their IPO:

You can access the complete research findings here.

1. Tesla

• IPO date: June 29, 2010
• IPO offer price: USD 17
• Price on June 8, 2026: USD 408.95
• Price change since IPO: 24x

Tesla has made early investors the most money of any major IPO. The electric car maker went public at $17 a share in June 2010, and that same share is now worth nearly USD 409, a 24x increase in price. That means $1,000 put in on day one would be sitting at around USD 24K today. What makes this unusual is that Tesla wasn’t turning a profit when it went public, and plenty of Wall Street analysts told investors to stay away.

2. Adobe

Adobe’s returns over 40 years put it ahead of almost every household tech name. The software company got listed on the Nasdaq in August 1986 at USD 11 per share. That same share closed at $244.99 just recently, more than 22 times the original price. In other words, a $1,000 investment in Adobe at the IPO would be worth roughly 22,270 dollars now. 

3. Microsoft

Microsoft debuted on the same exchange as Adobe in the same year, listing on March 13, 1986, at USD 21 a share. Today, that share trades at $411.74, nearly 20 times the IPO price, and a $1,000 stake from that day would now be worth close to USD 19,600. For most of its first two decades, Microsoft’s growth came almost entirely from Windows and Office. The company’s second wind came later, when CEO Satya Nadella shifted its focus to cloud computing.

4. Nvidia

Nvidia was listed in January 1999 at USD 12 per share, right in the middle of the dot-com boom, and survived the crash that wiped out most of its early peers. Its share price has since reached $208.64, a 17x gain from the IPO price. For most of its history, Nvidia was known mainly as a gaming chip company. The AI boom changed that completely, and its GPUs turned out to be exactly what was needed to train large language models.

5. Salesforce

Salesforce went public in June 2004 at $11 per share and has grown to USD 182.55, a return of nearly 17 times the original price. While it took 22 years to get there, a $1,000 stake from the IPO would be worth about 16,595 dollars today. Salesforce was among the first companies to sell business software entirely over the internet, and that bet has paid off as cloud-based tools became the default for corporate America.

A market analyst from Taurex commented on the findings:

“AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are genuinely difficult to value right now. Revenue is growing fast, but so are the costs. Training the next generation of models requires billions in computing infrastructure, and that number keeps going up. SpaceX is a different kind of bet: it has real contracts, real hardware, and a dominant position in commercial launches. But both carry the same fundamental risk that any IPO does: you’re buying a story about the future, and the future has a way of not going as planned.”