Tesla Just Got "Humiliated" – And It's the Best Thing That Could Have Happened

$1.5 trillion valuation after a second straight year of declining deliveries proves the market sees what headlines refuse to

Tesla delivered 1.64 million vehicles in 2025 – down 8.5% from 2024 – while BYD sold 2.26 million pure EVs, up 28%. The crown changed hands again. Headlines screamed defeat. Yet the stock ended the year up 11% at a $1.5 trillion market cap and a P/E of 279 – a multiple that makes Nvidia look cheap. Either every institution on Earth has lost its mind, or the market is aggressively pricing something that has almost nothing to do with selling cars.

It’s the second one.

Key Takeaways

• Car deliveries fell 8.5% YoY while the stock rose 11% and hit $1.5 trillion – the highest P/E in big tech

• Energy storage deployments more than doubled to 46.7 GWh with Q4 gross margins of 31.4% – nearly 2× the automotive margin

• 7+ billion FSD miles driven, on track for 10 billion by mid-2026 – no competitor is within an order of magnitude

• Unsupervised robotaxi testing (zero humans in the front seat) is live in Austin today, expanding to multiple cities in 2026

• Cybercab (purpose-built, no wheel/pedals) mass production still targeted for April 2026 – on schedule so far

• BYD unit volume is up but profits are down 30% YoY and gross margins collapsed to ~16% – classic race-to-the-bottom playbook

• Tesla is intentionally walking away from the volume game to dominate autonomy, robotics, and grid-scale energy instead