Elon Musk has spent years cultivating the image of a once-in-a-generation genius. Tesla’s recent slide suggests something else: a CEO whose instincts are increasingly bad, whose priorities are misaligned, and whose own behavior is actively damaging the company he leads.
Tesla didn’t lose the global EV sales lead to BYD because the market turned. It lost because Musk made avoidable mistakes—strategic, product, and cultural—while competitors executed.
Start with the Cybertruck. Announced in 2019 as a mass-market pickup, it arrived years late, at roughly double the promised price, with limited production and early recalls. The design was polarizing rather than inclusive, shrinking the addressable market instead of expanding it. A smarter executive would have killed or radically simplified the project early. Musk doubled down, tying up engineering resources for years to produce a niche vehicle with little strategic payoff.
The rest of Tesla’s lineup tells a similar story. The Model 3 and Model Y still sell, but they’re nearly decade-old platforms in a market that now moves fast. The Model S and X are effectively vanity products. Tesla’s primary response has been price cuts instead of innovation—an admission that the product pipeline is thin. BYD, meanwhile, is shipping new vehicles across multiple segments, iterating quickly, and controlling costs. That’s not brilliance. That’s basic execution.
Then there’s the brand damage—entirely self-inflicted. Tesla’s core customers were environmentally minded, tech-forward, and politically moderate to progressive. Musk chose to alienate them. His takeover of Twitter, rebranded as X, his embrace of right-wing grievance politics, conspiracy signaling, and repeated engagement with antisemitic tropes didn’t broaden Tesla’s appeal. They narrowed it. Advertisers fled X. Tesla owners became reluctant brand ambassadors.
A smarter person would have recognized a simple fact: cars are identity purchases. When the CEO becomes a far right zealot, the brand absorbs the cost. Musk seemed to assume he could replace lost customers with a new audience. He was wrong. The people cheering him on online are not, in meaningful numbers, buying EVs.
Finally, there’s focus. While competitors ship cars, Musk talks about humanoid robots, AI supremacy, and autonomy timelines that continue to slip. A low-cost Tesla—the product that actually matters—remains hypothetical. This isn’t visionary thinking.
And when it comes to self-driving cars, an area Musk claimed to be Tesla’s future, he’s falling further behind there as well. Google and several Chinese companies have thousands of self-driving vehicles in service, while Tesla is still unable to put cars on the road without backup drivers.
It wasn’t easy to cause Tesla, once in the lead in so many areas, to fall so far behind in all of its areas of competency. Yet somehow Musk managed to do it and destroy so much of what he created. That’s not the mark of a genius, but more like a fool.
Musk’s reputation as an innovator also deserves scrutiny. The breakthroughs most often credited to him—at Tesla, SpaceX, and elsewhere—were largely conceived, engineered, and executed by teams of deeply experienced specialists. Musk’s real contribution has historically been capital, pressure, and marketing, not technical invention. That model can work when paired with discipline and restraint. It fails when the person at the center starts believing the myth that he alone is the source of the innovation.