How many pieces are in the largest Lego set ever released?

How to get close to this number

Bound it by what a person will actually build. A set is limited by assembly time and by price, and beyond a certain size neither the customer nor the shelf can take it. Tens of thousands of pieces would take weeks to build and cost more than most people spend on a hobby, which puts the ceiling around ten thousand.

The tyre statistic in the explanation is the genuinely surprising one: this is the world's largest tyre manufacturer by unit count, producing more small rubber tyres annually than the major car tyre companies combined. Unit counts and value are completely different rankings, and a company can lead a category on volume while being irrelevant to it commercially.

That is worth generalising because it recurs: superlatives by count and superlatives by size or value frequently point at different holders. The largest producer of anything by units is often making something very small, and reading which metric a record uses is most of understanding what it means.