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The template only earns its keep if you actually put two cases next to each other.

This is the reason every teardown answers the same questions in the same order. Put a luxury house beside a console platform and the differences stop being vibes — one is refusing sales to protect a price, the other is selling below cost to collect a toll, and both are defending a moat.

Case ACase B

Automotive · NASDAQ: TSLA

Tesla

Builds electric cars and grid batteries in its own factories, sells them without dealers, and trades at a price that assumes the cars are the least valuable thing it makes.

Technology · NASDAQ: AMZN

Amazon

Runs a near-breakeven retail operation at enormous scale, and earns essentially all of its profit from renting out the two things that operation forced it to build — computing capacity and shelf placement.

The thesis in one line

Tesla is two companies sharing one share price: a carmaker earning a carmaker's margin, and a promise that has not yet shipped.

The store is not the business. The store is the customer acquisition cost for the businesses.

Verdict

Pass

Own it

Moat

Contested

Scale economics · Brand · Process power · Distribution

Wide

Scale economics · Network effects · Process power · Switching costs

Porter's five forces

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Competitive rivalry

Threat of new entrants

Threat of substitutes

Buyer power

Supplier power

Headline figures

Revenue: $97.7B
Vehicles delivered: 1.79M
Energy storage deployed: 31.4 GWh
Dealerships: 0

Net sales: $638B
AWS share of operating income: ~58%
Retail operating margin: ~5.4%
Third-party share of units: ~60%

Unit economics

One vehicle delivered in 2024 (illustrative, from segment totals divided by 1.79 million deliveries)

On this arithmetic, more than half of the operating profit on each car is a credit paid by a competitor for not building one. The manufacturing is genuinely efficient — cost per vehicle fell below $35,000 in late 2024 — but the price cuts gave most of that efficiency to the customer.

One $50 third-party item sold through Amazon

Amazon captures roughly 38% of the sale price and carries none of the inventory risk. The seller took the risk, paid for the warehouse, and then paid again to be found in a search of Amazon's own catalogue.

What would change her mind

A driverless Tesla service — no monitor in the car — operating in several cities, disclosed with paid rides and miles per intervention, and growing quarter on quarter. That is the moment the software business becomes an analysable business rather than a claim, and I would re-run the valuation on that day. Short of that, an automotive gross margin back above 25% without price rises would tell me the cost advantage over China is wider than I think.

If AWS revenue growth falls below 15% for two consecutive quarters while segment operating margin also declines, the cloud business is being commoditised rather than merely contested, and the capex is being spent defending share rather than buying growth. That combination — decelerating growth and compressing margin at the same time — breaks the thesis outright. A single weak quarter on either measure alone does not.

2 mechanisms in common

vertical integration own the customer