Tesla’s stock looks like a rocket even if its business looks like... Volkswagen?

Selling more electrified vehicles than you did in 2023 was no guarantee of stock-market success for automakers in 2024. But there was one sure route to a lower share price: seeing annual EV sales shrink. Unless, of course, you’re Tesla.

Figures released on January 2 showed that Elon Musk’s car company missed expectations for its fourth-quarter and full-year deliveries, leading to a severe sell-off in the stock that was quickly erased the following session. A contraction in EV sales was uncommon, looking at this nonexhaustive list of big players in the space:

Based on its operational results, Tesla looks a lot more like Volkswagen, an established legacy automaker that was an early entrant into EVs and is nonetheless having its lunch eaten in the face of Chinese competition.

And yet Tesla’s 2024 stock-price performance outdid every member of this group outside Geely Automobile Holdings.

Of course, just seeing top-line EV volumes grow is no panacea for an automaker. American car companies like General Motors and Ford are still heavily reliant on ICE vehicle sales. And major Chinese automakers tend to have lower profit margins than their American peers — or, in the case of Nio, XPeng’s, and GAC, they’re still outright losing money.

But this massive divergence between the core business and its stock-market performance reinforces how much of Tesla’s market value is tied to high-margin business lines it might be a leader in at some point in the future as well as its head honcho’s relationship with the incoming US president, rather than the state of its EV sales.