Musk defends Cybertruck's end, says some deposits will be refunded

Elon Musk is defending Tesla’s decision to stop building the Cybertruck, arguing in an X post on Monday that order demand for the polarizing steel-clad pickup far outstrips what the company can produce. Musk said Tesla will halt Cybertruck production in about eight months, and that the company will try to build as many trucks as it can before then — though, he acknowledged, Tesla will “have to return deposits for a lot of people.”

Musk rejected the idea that the Cybertruck was unprofitable, framing the shutdown instead as a trade-off: continuing to build it, in his telling, costs Tesla more in forgone capacity than the money it brings in, measured against what that same factory space could produce for the two-seat Cybercab robotaxi. He said last week that Tesla intends to redirect that capacity toward building more Cybercabs.

The Cybertruck’s trajectory has fallen well short of Musk’s early forecasts. The first units reached customers in late 2023, when reservations had swelled to 1 million by Musk’s count and he predicted annual sales of around 250,000. Tesla has never disclosed Cybertruck sales figures, but industry estimates put the total sold at around 71,000 since deliveries began in November 2023. A meaningful share of those sales ran through Musk’s own corporate orbit: SpaceX — which now operates under the name SpaceXSI — spent $131 million on Cybertrucks from Tesla during 2025, a figure disclosed in its IPO-bound S-1 filing. Another Musk venture, xAI, separately spent $430 million on Tesla’s Megapack batteries for its data centers, a purchase made before xAI combined with SpaceX.

Sales had lagged for months, but ending production could give the Cybertruck a short-term lift from buyers looking to own one before it disappears — even if that bump falls well short of the sales volumes Musk once projected.

Why it matters

The Cybertruck’s wind-down shows Tesla now measuring factory capacity against robotaxi production rather than any single vehicle line — a reallocation Musk frames as a rational trade, not a retreat.