Tesla FY2024 Earnings: Where Did the Margin Go?

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 — Megapack turned this into a real segment
• Services & other: $10.5B — Superchargers, insurance, repairs
• Regulatory credits: $2.8B — nearly pure profit, and bigger than most people think
• Automotive leasing: $1.8B

The energy and services ribbons are the chart's quiet story: a fifth of Tesla is no longer selling cars.

💰 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
• Operating profit: $7.1B — thinner than the credits + energy contribution combined

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) is the number that moves the stock. The flow makes the mechanism visible: when the cost-of-revenue ribbon widens by even 2 points, operating profit — the thinnest major ribbon on the chart — takes the entire hit.

The bottom line

Tesla FY2024 is a margin-compression story with an energy subplot. The Sankey makes both legible in seconds: a giant gray cost river, a thin green survival channel, and two young ribbons (energy, services) that could redraw the chart in three years.

Watch it change quarter by quarter on Sankify — every period from the filings, one click apart.