What if you bought General Motors (2010 IPO) in 2012?
US Consumer · Autos. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play3.0× · S&P 500 same money: $5,312
$1,000 in General Motors (2010 IPO) at the start of 2012 would be worth about $3,000 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
This is the 'new' General Motors, created in 2009 from the good assets of the bankrupt original and returned to the stock market in November 2010 with one of the largest IPOs in history. The US Treasury sold its stake over the next few years at a loss. Early investors waited a long time: the shares spent much of the 2010s below the IPO price despite healthy truck profits.
Mary Barra became CEO in 2014 just as an ignition-switch defect linked to many deaths became a scandal. She then shrank GM into a more profitable company, selling Opel and Vauxhall to PSA in 2017 and leaving several unprofitable markets. GM bet heavily on autonomy through Cruise, but after a 2023 accident in San Francisco it stopped funding the robotaxi business in late 2024. What finally lifted the shares was less a vision than arithmetic: big trucks and SUVs generated cash, and GM used it for large buybacks while the stock traded at a low multiple of earnings.
The lesson: A company emerging from bankruptcy can be a different investment entirely; the new equity holders inherit the assets without the old debts.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | $20.00 | $3,000 | $5,312 | 3.0× |
| 2015 | $35.00 | $1,714 | $3,301 | 1.7× |
| 2018 | $41.00 | $1,463 | $2,519 | 1.5× |
| 2020 | $37.00 | $1,622 | $2,092 | 1.6× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2012, turning $1,000 into $3,000. The S&P 500 from that same year: $5,312.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. General Motors (2010 IPO) is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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