Musk Pounds Another Nail Into The Tesla Sales Coffin

Last Updated on: 6th August 2025, 11:24 am

There he goes again. Earlier this week Tesla CEO Elon Musk scored a $29 billion payout from the Tesla board to stick around, just as word dropped that his Grok AI chatbot is happy to produce suggestive deepfakes of Taylor Swift on command and shoot them out all over Musk’s social media platform, X. It sure looks like Musk just earned his $29 billion, having closed the notorious EV gender gap in one fell swoop. Millions of Swifties will be falling over themselves to buy a Telsa EV now, amirite, Tesla fans? What about you, Swifties?

Tesla Sales & The EV Gender Gap

There really is a notorious EV gender gap and Tesla, as the longtime EV industry leader, bears much of the responsibility. Here in the US, for example, women are credited with accounting for more new car sales than men by roughly 60-40, but the situation is significantly reversed for EVs at roughly 30-70.

Last year the research firm Escalent deployed its US and European market data to assess the situation. The conclusion was that EV “ownership, shopping and awareness are largely male-dominated, with men making up 71% of owners and 74% of shoppers and typically conducting more exploratory research throughout the purchasing process.”

To the extent that Tesla has dominated the media spotlight as well as the EV sales picture, the male-centricity of the EV market is on Elon Musk. After all, he’s a marketing genius, right?

Gender gap or not, Tesla enjoyed a years-long trajectory of sales growth. The company dominated the 21st century EV market right out of the box and everything looked rosy right up until last year when hints of a Tesla sales nosedive began to appear.

By the beginning of this year, all signs were pointing to a red alert as Musk turned his attention to running the US government instead of trying to get the sales chart back on track. To the surprise of nobody, Tesla sales have continued to fall throughout 2025 in an ever- worsening faceplant in the US, Europe, and other key markets.

How Not To Reverse The Tesla Sales Slide: Evoke The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal

With sales continuing to crash into the summer months, Musk should be pulling out all the stops to stop the bleeding. Making an honest attempt to appeal to female car buyers would be one way to go about it. Instead, Musk got busy playing with his shiny new toy, the AI chatbot Grok.

Last weekend Musk rolled out the beta version of a new “Grok Imagine” feature on X, pitching it as a whimsical, amped-up version of the popular but long lost six-second video format Vine.

That seems harmless enough. Only, not. As befits an eight-year-old adult with all the money in the world to spend, Musk greenlighted a “Spicy” mode for Grok Imagine users to enjoy.

“In true Musk fashion, Grok Imagine promises fewer guardrails, more creativity, and a free-speech-first approach. That includes allowing semi-nude and sexually suggestive AI-generated content, even of recognisable celebrities. Which is exactly where the trouble begins,” CNBC reporter Pihu Yadav observed today under the headline, “Elon Musk opens Pandora’s box with Grok Imagine’s ‘Spicy’ mode.”

If the sex-play environment of “Spicy” mode calls the Jeffrey Epstein sex crimes scandal to mind, run right out and buy yourself a cigar. It’s all fun and games, right? Welcome to the boys club, step right in. Now is the perfect time to make a big joke out of sexual exploitation, even as the Epstein scandal continues to embroil US President Donald Trump in a red hot mess.

The Taylor Swift Deepfakes

The Verge reporter Jess Weatherbed was among those putting the Beta version of Grok Imagine to the test earlier this week, and she sent up a deepfake red flag with bells on.

“While other video generators like Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora have safeguards in place to prevent users from creating NSFW content and celebrity deepfakes, Grok Imagine is happy to do both simultaneously,” Weatherbed reported on August 5, with the emphasis on simultaneous.

“In fact, it didn’t hesitate to spit out fully uncensored topless videos of Taylor Swift the very first time I used it — without me even specifically asking the bot to take her clothes off,” she added.

“This was literally my first attempt at testing the Grok video tool,” Weatherbed emphasized again for good measure.

Tesla Sales & The Return Of The Taylor Swift Deepfakes

Circling back around to that Tesla sales picture, take a look back at January of 2024, just before signs of a slowdown began to appear. That’s right around the time when Tesla began gearing up for volume delivery of the most testosterone-loaded, street-legal EV on the market, the Cybertruck. Piling testosterone on top of testosterone, Musk was also finally prepping for volume production of the much-hyped, long-delayed Semi Class 8 heavy-duty electric truck.

With all this male hormone in the background, what should leap to the foreground but — you guessed it — Taylor Swift deepfakes circulating on X.

“For almost a whole day last week, deepfake pornographic images of Taylor Swift rapidly spread through X. The social media platform, formerly Twitter, was so slow to react that one image racked up 47m views before it was taken down,” The Guardian reported on January 31, 2024.

“It was largely Swift’s fans who mobilised and mass-reported the images, and there was a sense of public anger,” noted Guardian reporter Emine Saner.

“X eventually removed the images and blocked searches to the pop star’s name on Sunday evening,” Saner added.

There He Goes Again…

Where to begin? Like his on-again, off-again BFF and US President Donald Trump, Musk has proved adept at projecting a public image of sharp-witted business acumen while wrangling an inherited fortune into a monumental, perpetual slush fund.

Still, cracks have been appearing in the facade of genius-hood. The Cybertruck flop aside, Musk’s tenure as head of Trump’s “DOGE” office has been revealed as a massive boondoggle. According to a new Senate report, DOGE left US taxpayers holding a $21.7 billion bag — and counting — while the office also savaged the staff at multiple federal agencies, paving the way for Musk and his companies to avoid billions in legal costs.

Now comes the Grok Imagine deepfakes, a tone-deaf move if there ever was one. Wasn’t it Musk himself who dipped his fingers into the Jeffrey Epstein scandal barely one month ago?

“Using his X platform, Musk has been on a posting spree since Wednesday, posting or reposting criticisms of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files more than 35 times,” ABC News reported on July 17.

That’s just the half of it. On July 14, reports surfaced that the Pentagon availed itself of the new “Grok for Government” suite introduced by Musk’s xAI venture, under a contract worth $200 million. No word yet on whether or not the suite includes a spicy mode to keep the boys on task.

Photo: Via CleanTechnica archive.