Tesla FY2024 Earnings: Where Did the Margin Go?
Tesla's FY2024 income statement as a Sankey diagram: $97.7B of revenue, a thinning 17.9% gross margin, and the growing role of energy, credits, and services. All from the 10-K.
Tesla's FY2024 10-K tells a very different story from the mega-cap software charts: a hardware company in a price war, with a gross margin about a quarter of NVIDIA's — and a couple of quietly growing ribbons that deserve more attention than they get.
📊 The headline numbers
- Revenue: $97.7B
- Gross profit: $17.4B (17.9% margin)
- Operating profit: $7.1B (7.2% margin)
- Net profit: $7.1B (7.3% margin)
🚗 The left fan: more than cars, finally
- Automotive sales: $72.5B — still three-quarters of the company
- Energy generation & storage: $10.1B — up 67% on Megapack and Powerwall deployments, per the 10-K
- Services & other: $10.5B — Superchargers, insurance, repairs
- Regulatory credits: $2.8B — nearly pure profit, since the 10-K says they carry negligible incremental costs
- Automotive leasing: $1.8B
The energy and services ribbons are the chart's quiet story: together they bring in over a fifth of Tesla's revenue.
💰 The squeeze in the middle
Cost of revenue at $80.2B consumes 82% of every dollar — the price-cut strategy in one ribbon. What survives:
- R&D: $4.5B — AI, FSD, and next-gen platforms
- SG&A: $5.2B
- Restructuring & other: $0.7B
- Operating profit: $7.1B — down from $8.9B in FY2023
Note the regulatory credits ribbon against the $7.1B of operating profit: without those near-pure-margin credits, Tesla's operating picture would look materially different.
🧮 The ratio to watch
Automotive gross margin (ex-credits) slid from 17.7% in FY2023 to 15.4% in FY2024, measured as automotive revenue less regulatory credits against the 10-K's total automotive cost of revenues. The chart draws the company-wide version. When the cost-of-revenue ribbon widens by even 2 points, operating profit takes the entire hit, about $2B of its $7.1B.
The bottom line
Tesla FY2024 is a margin-compression story with an energy subplot. The Sankey makes both legible in seconds: a giant red cost river, a thin green survival channel, and two growing ribbons (energy, services) that could redraw the chart.
Watch it change quarter by quarter on Sankify — each period drawn from the filings.
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