Days after Tesla released dismal 2025 sales numbers, CEO Elon Musk took to twitter to not only overestimate the company’s current production numbers, but to wrongly claim that they are “rising” after two years of declines.
Tesla’s delivery results, released Friday, showed total 2025 vehicle deliveries of 1.63 million vehicles.
That’s a whole lot of cars, and puts Tesla in 2nd place globally for EV deliveries, behind Chinese EV maker BYD.
2nd place is no slouch, but it’s a decline from Tesla’s previous position as the world’s leader in EVs. And that change in places comes not just from delivery growth for BYD, but a decline in Tesla sales, despite global EV market which continues to rise
Tesla’s sales decline was even worse than Tesla’s own low expectations. And the decline is even worse in some territories, like Europe.
And this year’s decline builds on a previous decline from last year, meaning Tesla’s sales have now declined for two years in a row, for the first time in the company’s history.
Those declines happened despite a slate of new or refreshed models, like the Model 3 Highland and Model Y Juniper. The Juniper refresh, in particular, was supposed to create more demand for the formerly world’s best-selling car, the Model Y. But it failed to retake that crown in 2025.
And then there’s the Cybertruck. The Cybertruck started deliveries in late 2023 (scaling up in early 2024), with over a million people reportedly waiting to purchase it. But it turned out to be a commercial flop, and sales are now low.
After two years of declining sales in a rising market, most companies would be in emergency mode, trying to figure out how to reverse the trend.
Or, if you’re Elon Musk, you can just pretend that down is up, showing ignorance of the last two years of your company’s operations.
Musk shows he doesn’t know what’s happening with his company (again)
Musk took to twitter today to talk about NVIDIA’s AI announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show, happening this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.
In his response, he dismissed the rest of the auto industry’s advancements in AI hardware, bragging about Tesla’s chips (which have still failed to deliver on Musk’s self-driving promises). But in the end of the tweet, he said something particularly revealing about his knowledge of his company’s workings.
That last sentence is elucidating: Musk claims that Tesla is making “~2M cars/year and rising.”
First, Tesla is not making 2 million cars a year. In fact, it has never reached that number, peaking at 1.85 million in 2023. But as mentioned above, that number has gone down since then, and Tesla only made 1.65 million cars in 2025.
He did put a “~” in there, but that tilde is doing a lot of work, lifting Tesla’s declining production numbers by nearly 350k units, which is hardly a rounding error by anyone’s estimation.
But one thing Tesla’s production numbers aren’t doing is rising. They’ve been going down for two years, not up. It boggles the mind that a CEO can be so disconnected from his own company’s operations that he doesn’t know this (but then, he did recently claim the Model Y was still the best-selling car in the world, even though it was dethroned months ago).
Further, the next year is looking to be a rough one in Tesla’s home market, largely due to the Musk’s own opposition to electric cars.
Musk is the reason his company is sinking
Musk has dedicated a significant amount of his personal wealth, and most of his public advocacy, to supporting a fossil-fuel-backed political party that is actively trying to harm EVs in the US.
This actually did lead to a record quarter for Tesla in Q3, driven by a pull-forward in demand of buyers purchasing EVs before republicans inflated their price by $7,500. But that will likely be followed by a trough in sales for the next year or two, as the policies Musk funded work to increase pollution and fuel costs for Americans.
And now, we’re getting to the crux of the problem: the sales decline Tesla is currently experiencing comes as the direct result of Musk’s meddling in politics, and Tesla knows it. The company directly noted that it lost $1.4 billion in Q3 alone due to Musk’s lobbying activities, but that’s only part of the negative effect Musk has had on the company.
Musk spent a few months in 2025 in an unofficial government advisory position, during which he recommended changes that would increase the US budget deficit and which caused millions of deaths. These months were followed by a fiery breakup wherein Musk stated Donald Trump’s close association with infamous sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (though this did not stop Musk from later bragging about a “lovely dinner” with said Epstein associate).
Beyond his time cosplaying in government, Musk’s behavior has included support for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a defense of Hitler’s actions in the Holocaust, among many other white supremacist statements.
All of these actions have driven protests against the company, embarrassed owners and pushed many customers away, leading to the sales declines we see above.
Top comment by Togga
Norwegians went overboard to get a Model Y LR before new year due to increased taxes. Now, Tesla has included the new taxes, but has also increased the interest rate from 0% in 3 years to 5.7%. So the net effect the first 3 years is a cost increase of NOK 117,907, equivalent to USD 11780. Thank you, and good night.
Musk did show one moment of lucidity in December, during an interview with Katie Miller, wife of American white supremacist Stephen Miller. In that interview, Musk said that if he had an opportunity to take back his time cosplaying as a government official, he wouldn’t do it again, and that he instead should have “worked on [his] companies.”
But that moment of lucidity is apparently over, now that he’s back to pretending down is up, and thinking his company’s fortunes are going in the exact opposite direction that he’s leading them.
That said, it does make sense on a psychological level that Musk would ignore the negative trend he’s caused in his own company’s sales. After all, if he recognized it, he might have to grapple with his own inadequacy as a CEO. And how could he possibly ever do that, with his vast army of bots (both computerized and human ones) telling him he’s a lot smarter than he actually is.
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