Kasper Ag Solutions

Carvana made about $6,800 in profit on every car they sold last quarter. The typical used car dealer makes around $1,500. Carvana makes four times as much because the car is just the start of what they sell you. About 85 out of every 100 Carvana buyers finance the car through Carvana. At CarMax, their biggest competitor, the same number is closer to 40. When you click "finance" on Carvana's website, they write the loan at one interest rate, then sell that loan to a bank or pension fund within days. They keep the gap between what you pay and what the bank pays them. That gap, multiplied across hundreds of thousands of buyers, is how they print money. Then come the add-ons. An extended warranty. Coverage that pays off your loan if the car gets totaled. An insurance referral to Root, a digital car insurance company Carvana owns a piece of. Each one stacks on top of the same checkout. The car is the bait. The loan is the meal. Everything else is dessert. This is why selling them your car at a price that felt too generous still works for them. The money they make on that trade-in shows up later, after the next buyer signs. They clean it up, sell it to someone else, and that someone else signs another Carvana loan. This is also why they aren't going anywhere. In May 2022 they bought ADESA, a used car auction company, for $2.2 billion. ADESA came with 56 auction yards across the US. Now Carvana owns the auction yard, the body shop that fixes the car up, the trucks that deliver it, and the lender that funds the next buyer. Every step of that car's journey happens inside something Carvana owns. Three years ago none of this looked like it would survive. Carvana's stock hit $3.55 in December 2022. They had over $5.7 billion in debt. The market thought they were going bankrupt. Then Apollo, a giant private equity firm, led a deal with their lenders that cut $1.2 billion of debt and pushed the deadlines out to 2028. Last quarter they sold 187,000 cars and made $405 million in profit in 90 days. They joined the S&P 500 in December. Their market cap sits near $84 billion. Bigger than Ford. The whole business looks confusing if you think of Carvana as a car company. The math gets simple once you see them as a lender that happens to deliver cars.