Days after Tesla released dismal 2025 sales numbers, CEO Elon Musk took to twitter to not only overestimate the companys current production numbers, but to wrongly claim that they are rising after two years of declines.

Teslas delivery results, released Friday, showed total 2025 vehicle deliveries of 1.63 million vehicles.

Thats 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 its a decline from Teslas previous position as the worlds 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

Teslas sales decline was even worse than Teslas own low expectations. And the decline is even worse in some territories, like Europe.

And this years decline builds on a previous decline from last year, meaning Teslas sales have now declined for two years in a row, for the first time in the companys 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 worlds best-selling car, the Model Y. But it failed to retake that crown in 2025.

And then theres 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 youre Elon Musk, you can just pretend that down is up, showing ignorance of the last two years of your companys operations.

Musk shows he doesnt know whats happening with his company (again)

Musk took to twitter today to talk about NVIDIAs AI announcements at the Consumer Electronics Show, happening this week in Las Vegas, Nevada.

In his response, he dismissed the rest of the auto industrys advancements in AI hardware, bragging about Teslas chips (which have still failed to deliver on Musks self-driving promises). But in the end of the tweet, he said something particularly revealing about his knowledge of his companys 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 Teslas declining production numbers by nearly 350k units, which is hardly a rounding error by anyones estimation.

But one thing Teslas production numbers arent doing is rising. Theyve been going down for two years, not up. It boggles the mind that a CEO can be so disconnected from his own companys operations that he doesnt 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 Teslas home market, largely due to the Musks 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, were getting to the crux of the problem: the sales decline Tesla is currently experiencing comes as the direct result of Musks meddling in politics, and Tesla knows it.

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 Trumps close association with famed sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein (though this did not stop Musk from later bragging about a lovely dinner with said associate).

Beyond his time cosplaying in government, Musks behavior has included support for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a defense of Hitlers 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.

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 wouldnt do it again, and that he instead should have worked on [his] companies.

But that moment of lucidity is apparently over, now that hes back to pretending down is up, and thinking his companys fortunes are going in the exact opposite direction that hes leading them.

That said, it does make sense on a psychological level that Musk would ignore the negative trend hes caused in his own companys 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 hes a lot smarter than he actually is.

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