Tesla Has Lost the Title of World’s Biggest EV Maker

This is not the first time we’ve observed it, but Tesla really isn’t a “car company” at this point. Elon Musk’s perpetual money machine has diversified into increasingly pointless and stupid directions over the years in its search of some kind of rationale for exactly why it should be valued in the trillions of dollars, most recently going all in on fake robots like Optimus, which Musk continues to tout for private home use despite the fact that in public appearances, the “robots” are still being remotely controlled by human beings so they can do such complex tasks as “walk around” and “pour drinks for people.” Falling by the wayside in all of this, meanwhile, is Tesla’s formerly world-leading edge in electric vehicles, and we can now formally say “formerly,” because Tesla has officially lost the title of the world’s biggest EV company. They’ve been significantly lapped by China’s BYD, which surged to 2.26 million EVs sold in 2025, while Tesla sold 1.64 million. That was a big decrease of 9% overall for Tesla from 2024, demonstrating the weakness of the brand both in the United States and abroad.

Much of Tesla’s slump can unsurprisingly be blamed directly on the spastic actions of Musk through the last few calendar years, as he completed his transformation from mere Twitter-buying troll to chief Donald Trump bootlicker, temporary shadow president and DOGE-lord. His effort to “cut government spending and waste” via the Department of Government Efficiency unsurprisingly ended up being a resounding failure, with most theoretical savings being impossible to quantify, eventually walked back, or simply replaced with new Republican spending, for a deficit that only continues growing. All the while, the Trump admin stabbed him in the back by ending the EV tax credits that incentivized consumers to buy electric vehicles. Musk himself has admitted that his time at DOGE was only “a little bit successful” (lol) at most, and that he wouldn’t even attempt to do it again if given the chance. Perhaps more important to Musk was the effect that his government cosplaying ended up having on public perception of Tesla and consumer interest in buying his cars, like the woeful failure of the Cybertruck. Oh, and he may have visited the Epstein Pedophile Island as well.

Musk predicted Tesla would sell 200K Cyber trucks in a year, and last quarter they sold 11,642 Cybertruck/Model S Sedans/Model X SUVs *combined*. The technical economics term for this is “hilarious.”

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— Ken Tremendous (@kentremendous.bsky.social) Jan 2, 2026 at 12:40 PM

Tesla’s board has of course long been aware that Musk is somehow both their golden goose and the albatross around their neck, and in May of 2025 they reportedly grew tired enough of his bullshit that they were attempting to replace him as CEO with someone who might actually show a bit of interest in the duties of the job. Instead, however, the company reversed face by the end of the year and decided to reward Musk with a compensation package that could ultimately be worth $1 trillion in stock value … provided that the company continues growing its market cap to an absurd degree over the next decade. And as our own Jacob Weindling pointed out, that is hardly a given. To quote his amusingly acerbic take:

This is yet another big bet on AI, as the whole industry is pitching an Underpants Gnomes-style business plan where they build a bunch of data centers far outpacing the present-day demand for AI, have no fucking idea what to do next, then claim we will enter an age of unprecedented prosperity. AI is definitely here to stay to some degree, and OpenAI advertising themselves this week as too big to fail is one example of how we’re stuck with it, but the lesson from the dot com bust is that Amazon and Apple were big winners in large part because there were so many other losers.

And Tesla is a loser. It’s a carbon credits company that sells a couple of cars and launched a truck so shambolic and dangerous it makes the notoriously combustible Ford Pinto look like a Boeing Dreamliner by comparison. I have lived the lesson of never short a cult, and Tesla is the ultimate proof that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, but Tesla is the exact kind of Pets.com-ass bubble that got popped in the 2000s. It’s a pinky promise, not a company, and it’s a lot harder to survive through a bear market solely on pinky promises.

To wit, the stock price of Tesla has remained difficult to put a dent in, although the last week has been rough, sending it plunging almost 10% in total. Still, even so, that represents the company being up by roughly 15% in the last calendar year, and more than 86% in the last five years. But much of those gains were built on the back of a company that at least dominated one emerging industry in EVs. Now Tesla doesn’t even have that feather in its cap anymore, and few but the Musk acolytes seem to care about its stated intention to dominate the “fake household robots” industry. The only people who really want those things are the streamers and influencers who are very much looking forward to abusing a humanoid robot on camera for clicks.

Tesla reports a 16% collapse in deliveries for the fourth quarter. Shares went up.

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— Mark Chadbourn (@chadbourn.bsky.social) Jan 2, 2026 at 9:17 AM

It’s perfectly fitting, by the way, that China’s BYD would blow by Tesla as an EV maker, offering comparable quality vehicles at prices that Musk’s company has struggled to match, even after stripping features out of the Model Y and Model 3 in an effort to bring their sticker prices down … again necessary after Trump and co. ended tax credits for EV vehicles, even after Musk threw his weight and cash behind getting Trump elected. Years ago, Musk had mocked BYD in an interview when asked if he saw the company as a competitor, saying that their cars were of poor quality: “Have you seen their car? I don’t think it’s particularly attractive, the technology is not very strong, and BYD as a company has pretty severe problems in their home turf in China.”

Now, years later, Musk finds himself purposefully making his flagship EVs worse and less feature rich, in order to compete with those very same Chinese EV manufacturers he was once mocking. Who’s producing junk now? It’s enough to make you want to ask Optimus to poorly mix up a batch of drinks.