Walmart went up 230% in the last 5 years… why?

I was looking at Walmart long-term chart and it kind of blew my mind. Over roughly the last five years WMT is up about 230%, which feels weird for a company that most people still think of as a slow, defensive retailer. What’s even stranger is the valuation it’s trading at now. The P/E is somewhere around 40–45x, which is the type of multiple you usually see on growth tech companies, not a grocery and big-box retailer.

From what I can tell, Walmart’s revenue growth has mostly been around ~5% and EBITDA growth closer to ~3%, so it’s not like athe underlying business suddenly started growing like a software company. Yet the stock basically tripled in a few years.

The bullish explanation I keep hearing is that Walmart is turning into more of a platform. People point to things like Walmart+, their advertising business, ecommerce logistics, and marketplace expansion. But at the end of the day it’s still a retailer with pretty thin margins.

So I’m trying to understand what the market is pricing here. Did Walmart actually transform into some kind of hybrid retail-tech platform… or did the market just decide that a stable company with decent execution deserves a tech-style multiple?

Right now it almost feels like Walmart is being treated as both a defensive bond proxy and a hyper-growth company at the same time, which doesn’t make a ton of sense to me.