You wanna see a dead body?
Third-quarter sales numbers for Tesla’s misbegotten Cybertruck are in, and it is definitely spooky season for tech titan Elon Musk, who moved only 5,385 of the hideous things between July 1 and Sept. 30, a drop of 63% over the same time period in 2024.
Sadly for Musk, this anemic quarter is a continuation of an already extremely sickly year for the hands-down world’s ugliest truck. For the whole of 2025, Tesla sold about 16,000 Cybertrucks, which is on track for about 20,000 for the year.
Recall, however, that this is the vehicle Musk boasted receiving 250,000 pre-orders for when it was announced in 2019. In 2023, he was telling shareholders he could sell as many as 500,000 per year.
Related | Tesla’s Cybertruck flop is historic. The brand collapse is even worse.
But the world’s richest man has a plan to fix things, and it involves selling all those Cybertrucks he’s got rotting away in abandoned mall parking lots to … himself.
Well, technically, to his other companies, but you get the drift.
Over this past weekend, xAI took delivery of several truckloads of Cybertrucks. It’s unclear whether those counted toward that pathetic third-quarter showing or whether this is intended to shore up flagging numbers for the fourth quarter. Either way, perhaps some business genius will explain why Musk’s artificial intelligence needs Cybertrucks. There don’t seem to be a lot of transportation needs while building out a gross tool to make hardcore AI porn more efficiently.
Musk’s SpaceX technology company would at least seem to have legitimate needs to transport materials, but because no one can admit that these purchases are just to stave off Tesla’s stock from tanking, they’re just pretending it was always the plan. Here’s Wes Morrill, the lead Cybertruck engineer, absolutely embarrassing himself:
“Love to see the ICE [internal combustion engine, not the people terrorizing immigrants] support fleets from Tesla and SpaceX get replaced with Cybertruck. When we were engineering it, this was always part of the dream,” Morrill claimed. “Never imagined how hard the fleet photos at starbase would go. Looking forward to more of this.”
Come on, man. Have some dignity.
Morrill is right about one thing, though. He’s going to see more of this. SpaceX took delivery of several hundred Cybertrucks in the past week, with a plan to purchase hundreds, or even thousands, more. Reportedly, Tesla is also going to be using some of the unsold Cybertrucks as part of their own mobile service fleet.
Terrific idea to stock your service fleet with vehicles that have already been subject to eight separate recalls in two years.
If you’re thinking all of this looks a lot like Musk trying to juice his Tesla sales numbers—and therefore his Tesla stock share price—by playing a shell game with his own companies, you’re not alone. It isn’t quite the same as the disastrous special purpose entities that ultimately brought energy company Enron down, but it’s not far off either.
Moving your own assets around between companies to hide your catastrophic sales numbers is not really a sustainable business approach.
Musk is also running up against the fact that the third quarter of 2025 is likely going to be as good as it gets in the EV market for a long while. The federal EV tax credit expired on Sept. 30, and with Donald Trump in the White House, there’s no real possibility of seeing any tax credits related to woke shit like electric vehicles any time soon.
Overall, EV manufacturers posted huge gains as buyers raced to take advantage of the credit, but even the promise of a $7,500 credit was apparently not enough to get many people to buy the uggo Cybertruck.
Related | How Trump and Musk went from best friends to frenemies to nuclear war
Since Musk fell out of favor with his former bestie, he can’t count on any more help from the White House to hawk his wares, which at least spares the rest of us a repeat of the embarrassing spectacle of Trump turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom.
What Musk is really dealing with is a complete collapse of the Tesla brand’s prestige—a collapse which he can entirely thank himself for. No one wants your fascist ride, dude.
