First came the insult.

In the pre-holiday confusion, Elon Musk reported that Tesla had missed consensus estimates for Model S/X deliveries in Q2, when the electric car company sold just 22,000 vehicles, below the 22,912 expected, and just barely above the bottom end of its own range. As he always does, Musk blamed the disappointing data on production bottlenecks in this case a "severe battery production shortfall", yet that did not explain why i) Tesla produced nearly 4k more vehicles in the quarter, or 25,708 suggesting the problem was not on the supply but demand side, and ii) Musk - who enjoys tweeting almost as much as the president - never mentioned said production hurdle in public previously, either on the social network, in an 8K, or during the recent earnings call.

There was an even bigger problem: after topping at 11.5k deliveries in Q1, the coolness factor behind the Model X appears to have fizzled, with just 10K Model X deliveries in the second quarter.