Tesla Is Utterly Cooked
2025 was a bad year for Tesla, but it is only going to get worse from here.
It has been a deliciously bad few weeks for Elon Musk. Tesla’s financials are down the stinker once again, and now everyone knows he practically begged to party on Epstein’s paedophile island years after Epstein’s very public conviction for soliciting a minor. What? The chronically online, egotistical, alt-right edgelord who unleashed a CSAM generation bot onto the remnants of Twitter wanted to rub elbows with Epstein? Well, colour me surprised… I guess I should be equally surprised that turning a thriving EV empire into an AI memestock isn’t good for business either. But the consequences of all of this for Tesla are likely far, far worse than you might think. Let me explain.
Tesla’s Financials
Last Wednesday, Tesla held its earnings call for Q4 2025 and full-year 2025, and the results were horrific! Their profit fell 46% compared to 2025, making just $3.8 billion. For comparison, GM’s annual profits for 2025 are $11.59 billion, and even that is a 50% decline from last year. Tesla’s total vehicles delivered for 2025 fell to 1.63 million, marking the second year of decline, and revenue from vehicle sales fell 11% compared to 2024.
It is important to remember that, for years, Musk repeatedly stated that Tesla would grow at a 50% annual rate. Yet we are now seeing the complete opposite.
Regardless, these headline figures conceal the more worrying downward spiral.
Tesla’s Q4 2025 profits were down a colossal 61% compared to Q4 2024. In fact, of the $840 million in profit Tesla made in Q4 2025, $542 million came from regulatory emissions credits. This is a market Trump is actively moving to close, and even if he doesn’t, automakers buying these credits, such as Stellantis, Honda, and VW, are now significantly ramping up EV production and likely won’t need them in the near future.
So, not only is Tesla’s profitability on a steep downward trajectory, but also its main source of income is set to disappear, which will only speed up this car crash.
Tesla desperately needs a new source of revenue, and Musk knows it. It’s just unfortunate that his solution is far from sound.
Model S/X Out, Optimus Robot In
During the earnings call, Musk announced that Tesla will discontinue the Model S and Model X by the end of Q2 2026, and the Fremont factory in California that has been producing them for a decade will be retooled to produce the Optimus humanoid robot. Die-hard Tesla investors erupted at this announcement, as Musk had predicted that Optimus could rake in $10 trillion in revenue and push up Tesla’s valuation to $25 trillion.
However, given that the Model S and X were headed for the chop anyway and they are producing Optimus at Fremont, this looks more like a CEO dressing up bad business news in an AI outfit to make it look better.
Back in 2020, Tesla sold a combined total of 57,039 units of the Model S and Model X. In 2024, Tesla sold 12,426 Model Ss and 19,855 Model Xs, marking a sizeable 43.4% decline since 2020. But in 2025, Tesla sold just 5,889 Model Ss and 13,066 Model Xs, marking a massive 41.3% drop from the previous year.
The Model S/X production line at the Fremont factory has a 100,000-unit annual capacity, meaning that even in 2020, it was running at a desperately low 57% utilisation, but in 2025, it was running at an abysmal 19% utilisation. That alone is grounds to rethink the Model S and X.
Meanwhile, these models’ major competitors were hugely outselling them. For example, Porsche sold 16,339 Taycans in 2025, nearly three times as many as the Model S, and 45,367 units of the new Macan EV, outselling the Model X by 3.5 times.
Tesla had every reason to kill off the S and X. They had become a sales flop, and their factory would be better used to produce a different model with far higher demand, such as the promised Roadster, Semi or “Model 2”.
What doesn’t make sense is to build a humanoid robot there. Retooling a vehicle production line to produce a different vehicle is far cheaper and less time-consuming than converting it to produce an entirely different product. Fremont’s structure and layout were optimised to produce vehicles, and many of the machines and processes already in place can be reused when retooling for a new vehicle. Robot production lines are totally different, with distinct demands, machines, and systems.
It might genuinely be cheaper to build a totally new factory for Optimus. But Musk also wants to produce a million Optimus robots annually, and Fremont is unlikely to be able to meet that demand, necessitating the construction of a new factory or an expensive expansion of the existing one.
Blaming Optimus production for the discontinuation of the Model S and X, especially when there is strong demand for Tesla’s yet-to-be-released models that would be better suited to the factory, appears like a PR spin designed to hide the recent failures of these models.
Not to mention there is very little evidence that Optimus will ever produce the revenue Musk claimed it would.
Take UBTech, the company behind the Walker S2 humanoid robot, which companies like BYD are trialling in their production lines. The Financial Times recently reported that its chief brand officer, Michael Tam, said the company’s humanoid robot is “30 to 50 per cent as productive as humans and only in certain tasks such as stacking boxes and quality control.” That is horrifically inefficient, especially in a production-line setting where these humanoid robots literally take the space a human could work in. Let’s also not forget that this claim came from the guy responsible for the UBTech brand, so these numbers might be a little optimistic.
The Walker S2 is arguably miles ahead of Tesla’s Optimus robot. Not only is it already deployed in multiple relatively complex factory settings, but it has also been demonstrated performing complex tasks such as playing tennis with remarkable capability. Meanwhile, Tesla has deployed only two Optimus robots in its factories and has so far only demonstrated them walking on a flat surface or being poorly teleoperated.
So, it is safe to assume that Optimus is likely far less than 30% as productive as a human worker. That isn’t enough to enable it to replace a meaningful number of workers. Hell, it isn’t even enough to make it a useful tech demonstrator, let alone sell millions of them a year, revolutionise the economy, or increase Tesla’s valuation to $25 trillion.
In fact, industry experts are not convinced that humanoid robots are even a viable technology.
Chris Walti has publicly stated that humanoid robots simply don’t make sense and that the humanoid form factor isn’t “a useful form factor”. Like many robotics specialists, Walti points out that “most of the work that has to be done in industry is highly repetitive tasks where velocity is key” and that the humanoid form factor is highly inefficient at this, particularly compared to a specialised robot. As Walti put it, “We weren’t designed to do repetitive tasks over and over again. So why would you take a hyper-suboptimal system that really isn’t designed to do repetitive tasks and have it do repetitive tasks?” Walti isn’t alone in this view, with the likes of Brad Porter (former VP of Robotics at Amazon), Gartner Analysis and Ken Goldberg (UC Berkeley roboticist) agreeing with him.
Who is Mr Walti? Oh, just the guy Musk first hired to lead the Optimus project.
Even the person who initially developed Optimus doesn’t believe it is going to be a money maker. So, even if Tesla does start producing hordes of Optimus robots at its Fremont factory, it almost certainly won’t solve its dire revenue problems.
Good News?
Nonetheless, there was a hint of “good news” during this earnings call. Between 2024 and 2025, Tesla’s energy storage revenue increased by 26.5%, while its services revenue — which includes FSD, insurance, parts and supercharging — increased by 19%. Surely that is something for the Tesla shareholders to celebrate, right? Well… No.
The global battery storage market grew by 51% in 2025 compared to 2024. So, Tesla is drastically losing its market share here. This isn’t particularly surprising, as the failure of Tesla’s 4680 heavily impacted their capability in this market, and there are now substantially better options out there (read more here). But, in 2025, Tesla sold $430 million worth of battery storage to xAI, indicating that 16% of this 2025 revenue increase came from inside Musk’s empire, which implies that they are losing more market share than the initial figures might suggest.
As for the services branch, we know FSD didn’t drive this growth. A few months ago, Vaibhav Taneja, Tesla’s CFO, admitted that very few Tesla customers are paying for FSD and that FSD revenue was down in Q3 2025 compared to Q3 2024. We also know that Tesla’s Robotaxi business isn’t generating much revenue, as Tesla is struggling to expand the service or operate it autonomously.
Also, given that Musk disbanded the Supercharger network in 2024, we can assume that it was probably not the driving force behind this growth. So it must have come from sources like insurance and parts. This is good, in a sense, but it is not enough to keep Tesla or its hype afloat.
The Files
Oh, and Tesla’s CEO asking to visit Epstein’s Island years after his conviction for soliciting a minor is not good. Even the fact that they were this amicable is enough to deal career-ending reputation damage. But if it transpires that Musk was involved in what went down on the island, then the legal repercussions for him and Tesla could be huge. Thanks to corporate governance law, a CEO can be legally removed from their position if they are convicted of sexual abuse. Musk’s cult of personality is the foundation for all of Tesla’s value. If he goes, then Tesla sinks.
But there is also the question of how much flak this cult will accept. Even Musk’s die-hard followers are feeling the strain of his questionable political ties, his potentially illegal actions with X/Twitter, and his blatant lies about FSD and Doge, among many others. If it comes out that he was involved with Pizzagate or QAnon in real life, that might be the very large straw that breaks the camel’s back. And, once this cult of personality shatters, Tesla’s valuation will plummet.
To be clear, I am not accusing Musk of anything here. But the fact that this is possible, no matter how unlikely it is, is crushing news for Tesla.
Summary
We all knew Tesla wasn’t doing well, and this just confirms our suspicions. Do I expect Tesla to sink like a lead balloon? No. Right now, speculation is valued more highly than reality due to the insane state of the economy. But we know Tesla’s fundamentals and its very foundation are falling away. These factors will eventually undermine Musk’s speculative tomfoolery, and it will all come tumbling down.
Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion, and should not be taken as financial advice or accusations. Don’t forget to check out my YouTubechannel for more from me, or Subscribe. Oh, and don’t forget to hit the share button below to get the word out!
What goes around comes around you Ketamine NAZI asshole who has my social security information obtained illegally by his DOGE criminals!!
I get so much satisfaction reading your fun and informative posts about musk flushing his businesses down the crapper with one stupid decision after another after another. hehehe Thanks!! Loving it!!