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RJ Scaringe Is the Most Underrated CEO in Automotive
Editor’s note: This article reflects personal opinion and editorial analysis. It is not financial advice, investment guidance, or stock commentary. CEO performance and market valuation are both complicated topics and reasonable people will disagree on either. Do your own research before making any financial decisions.
RJ Scaringe is the most underrated CEO in the auto industry right now, and the stock price is telling you a story that doesn’t match what he’s actually done.
Look at the last eighteen months. Rivian shipped a clean Gen 2 refresh of the R1T and R1S, landed a multi-billion dollar joint venture with Volkswagen that most people still don’t fully understand the implications of, got the R2 through EPA certification on a brand new platform, and signed Uber to a robotaxi deal that’s already pushed Uber past a 10% ownership stake with up to $1.25 billion committed through 2031. In the middle of all that, the company turned its first full year of positive gross profit, more than doubled the commercial van business year over year in Q1, and held the line on a $45,000 R2 price even after the federal tax credit went away.
All of this happened while the EV market was going through the worst consumer downturn in a decade.
Now go look at RIVN. Trading in the mid teens. Wall Street treating the stock like the R2 launch is the only thing keeping the lights on, even though the company just reaffirmed 62,000 to 67,000 deliveries for the year and has a second factory being built in Georgia with R2 and R3 capacity on the roadmap.
That’s a huge gap between execution and valuation, and I don’t think it’s because investors are stupid. I think it’s because the industry still rewards the wrong stuff.
Elon gets the oxygen. Jim Farley and Mary Barra get the magazine covers and the prime time sit-downs. Every conversation about who wins the EV race gets framed around personality, Twitter posts, and robotaxi demo videos, and somewhere outside that noise, RJ is just quietly building the company.
He doesn’t tweet through news cycles. He doesn’t pick fights with regulators. When the tornado hit Building 2 this weekend, his first communication was an internal note to the team making sure everyone at Normal was safe.
And the stuff he is saying out loud is actually working. The VW deal pulled Rivian out of the cash crunch people were writing obituaries about in 2023. The Uber partnership set up a robotaxi path without Rivian having to build a ride-hailing stack from scratch. Redwood Materials has more than 100 second life Rivian battery packs spinning up a 10 megawatt-hour storage system at the Normal plant, which is the largest repurposed battery energy storage install at any US auto manufacturer. None of that happens if the person at the top isn’t running a real company.
I know the counterpoint. Rivian still loses a lot of money, the cash burn is real, and the R2 has to land clean or a bunch of the math stops working. All of that is true, and I’m not pretending Rivian is out of the woods. I’m saying the CEO has threaded a genuinely narrow needle over the last two years, and the recognition hasn’t come close to catching up.
If Ford had landed a multi-billion dollar tech deal with a German giant while launching a new platform and signing a robotaxi partnership in the same eighteen months, Farley would be on the cover of Fortune and CNBC would run a miniseries. Rivian’s CEO did all three, plus held the EV-only line when every other OEM was retreating to hybrids, plus kept the brand identity more or less intact through a downturn that killed off a lot of smaller players. And the loudest conversation about him right now is whether the stock is worth buying on the dip.
Maybe the market eventually catches up. Maybe it doesn’t. Valuations are weird and Wall Street’s attention has always been uneven, and honestly I’m not sure the stock price ever really tells you what the person running the company is worth.
The thing I keep coming back to is that I don’t think he even cares all that much. I’ve watched enough of his interviews and listened to enough earnings calls to believe RJ is genuinely more interested in building good vehicles than in being the main character of anything. That’s probably why he keeps getting underrated. It’s also probably part of the reason the company is still standing while half its peers have pivoted, scaled back, or quietly shut the EV side down entirely.
RJ does deserve more credit and this is a fantastic article! You can tell that RJ loves what he does and what he’s made and that passion is why I know Rivian is successful now and will continue to be successful in the future.
Dont forget to add in the autonomy advances AND their own chip The list goes on……..
He’s the quiet survivor – period!
He continues to lead #1.
All around – surround by a like-minded TEAM, no 👁️👁️’s.
RJ is a standout leader — someone who stays focused on building rather than getting pulled into political noise or public feuds. That kind of discipline is rare, and it’s exactly what a company needs to go the distance.
As an investor, I’m extremely bullish on Rivian. I believe Tesla and Rivian will define the future of the American automotive industry — Tesla blazing the trail, and Rivian executing with precision and steady improvement along the way.
RJ knows what he’s doing, and I trust his vision. Keep it up, Rivian team.
Thanks for this story. Every time I hear RJ speak, I’m struck by his clarity, confidence and vision — and the culture at Rivian clearly reflects that leadership. The strategic partnerships extend the vision he’s articulated so well, and the vehicles themselves are remarkable. I love my R1T and have my R2 on order. By nearly every measure that matters, Rivian stands out. RJ is underrated.
Great ceo? 90% share price depreciation over past 5 years, plus lost opportunity costs in a bull market = total loss for long term shareholders. Stop smoking hopium. RJ is the Dilution King and self proclaims publicly that he does not care about share price. Ergo: Dilution is ongoing and accelerating, at a a share price that has declined 90%. The simple math indicates the idiocy of a laissez faire attitude toward share price by RJ and Claire. In this respect, they are both incompetent. We see a lot of talk and even some evidence about custom AI chips and Autonomy. So, why isn’t this reflected in share price? If you are going to continuously dilute shares, doesn’t it make a whole lotta sense to get a more atrractive share price first? At this point, RJ and Claire have failed to represent shareholders’ interests. You can’t charge your car on hot air. Stop the idolatry guys. Rivian is not much better than the best Chinese EVs. If the executive management did a better job at obtaining a share price reflective of the potential here, maybe when they continuously dilute, the capital raises would come at a higher share price, then more funds would be available for increased R&D to stay ahead of the impressive Chinese EV products.
It is part of RJ’s job to care about share price. Yet he said clearly he does not care. Executives continue to engage in insider selling. They do not deserve this idolatry. At least not yet.
Neglecting shareholders is very dangerous, and Wall Street is punishing us all for it. RJ, Claire and others are too comfortable. They have a huge blind spot that must be addressed going forward.
Send your concerns to [email protected] and you’ll get automated idiot responses. The company does a shitty job defendi g share price and as a result, they put investors at risk, and this neglect also lowers long term odds of success.