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Commentary: How many Cybertrucks has Tesla sold to the public? Fewer than you might think
How bad are sales of Tesla’s Cybertruck? Nearly 20% of the vehicles went to Elon Musk’s other companies, raising questions about the vehicle’s future
The Cybertruck, Tesla’s would-be competitor in the EV pickup truck market, has long since secured its place as the Edsel of the electric vehicle age.
It’s been derided as unwieldy and ugly and unable to match other pickups in basic functionality. In the colorful take of Tesla critic Will Lockett, it’s “the vehicular form of halitosis” and an “ick’ on four wheels.”
But one doesn’t need words to describe how the Cybertruck has fared among the pickup-buying public; the numbers tell the story.
According to Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book, Tesla sold only 20,237 of the vehicles in 2025, down 48.1% from the 38,965 sold the year before. The slide continued in the first quarter of this year, Cox reported — 3,519 sold, down 45.1% from the 6,406 sold in the year-earlier period.
But there’s more to the story — or to be more precise, less.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, of the 7,071 Cybertruck U.S. registrations, 1,279 went to SpaceX, the rocketship company headed by Tesla boss Elon Musk, which is planning an initial public stock offering sometime this year. An additional 60 were registered by other companies in the Musk empire, namely xAI, Neuralink and the Boring Co.
In other words, nearly 20% of all the Cybertrucks registered in the U.S. in the fourth quarter went to Musk’s companies. Based on the Cybertruck’s starting price of $70,000, that’s the equivalent of $93.7 million in merchandise circulating within Musk’s orbit rather than going to outside buyers.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, of the 7,071 Cybertruck U.S. registrations, 1,279 went to SpaceX
The figures were compiled by S&P Global Mobility and reported by Bloomberg. I asked Tesla to comment but received no reply.
The transfers of Cybertrucks to other Musk companies raise questions about how he conflates the interests of his private companies and his public company (Tesla), arguably to the disadvantage of Tesla shareholders. More on that in a moment.
The sales numbers raise obvious questions about the future of the Cybertruck as part of Tesla’s five-model lineup. They also undermine Musk’s declared faith in the truck. When it was introduced in 2023, Musk asserted that he expected to sell 250,000 to 500,000 Cybertrucks a year once manufacturing capacity was fully engaged.
It would be hard to find market experts who took that prediction seriously, but few probably expected the shortfall to be so steep. Cybertruck’s 48.1% decline in 2025 sales compared with 2024 was the sharpest such decline of any EV in the U.S. market over that period, in which EV sales generally slumped.
Initial Cybertruck sales of 38,965 in 2024 seemed almost to validate Musk’s optimism. But negative perceptions took hold through the year and into 2025, starting with the ridicule the vehicle’s boxy design attracted on the street.
Poor manufacturing quality has prompted U.S. regulators to order eight recalls of Cybertrucks since its introduction, culminating in the March 2025 recall of almost every Cybertruck to correct the tendency of a stainless steel exterior panel to come off the vehicle at freeway speeds, posing a hazard to other drivers.
Online reports and videos showing Cybertrucks defeated by conditions such as uneven terrain and steep grades that are routinely managed by rival pickups may also have sapped buyer enthusiasm for the model.
It’s true that the Cybertruck has problems that aren’t shared with other EVs. One is that it can’t be sold in European Union countries, because the EU has found that its exterior design can imperil pedestrians.
Nor do other EV manufacturers have to contend with public obloquy being showered on their leaders; Tesla sales in Germany cratered last year after Musk threw his support behind the extreme-right neo-Nazi party Alternative for Germany. There, new Tesla vehicle registrations fell by 76.3% in February 2025 from the same month a year earlier — that is, to 1,429 from 6,029. The decline continued all year, resulting in an overall decline of 48.4%.
As my colleague Caroline Petrow-Cohen reported last year, public distemper over Musk’s position as the leader of DOGE, the quasi-governmental body that ran roughshod through the federal workforce after Donald Trump launched his second term, also may have cut into Tesla sales in the U.S. A study by Yale researchers last year estimated that Musk cost Tesla as many as 1.26 million car sales since October 2022, when he acquired the social media platform Twitter and gave greater access on it to the far right and other extremist voices.
That said, Teslas remained the best-selling EVs in the U.S. market last year with nearly 60% of EV unit sales, according to Cox. Its full-year decline of 7% was exceeded by several other carmakers with EVs in their lineups, including BMW (down 16.7%), Kia (down 39.7%) and Ford (down 14.1%).
The U.S. EV market generally lost ground after the expiration of federal incentives last year, but many individual models slumped sharply, including Ford’s all-electric version of its top-selling F-150 pickup, sales of which fell 18.5% from the year before (though it still outsold the Cybertruck).
Tesla’s transfers of Cybertrucks to other Musk operations should concern Tesla shareholders, depending on how much, if anything, SpaceX and the other companies paid for the vehicles. In arm’s-length transactions between related parties, the transfers should be marked at prices resembling those on the open market, whether individual or fleet sales.
Tesla has been vague to the point of opacity about these deals. In an amendment to its annual report filed on April 30 (after the Bloomberg report), it disclosed that it received about $143.3 million last year and $100,000 this year in deals with SpaceX, including “the sale of vehicles” at what may be market prices. But it didn’t say those deals involved the Cybertruck.
It would be interesting to know how SpaceX is using its Cybertrucks, since it wouldn’t seem to need a fleet to transport equipment headed for space in the back of pickup trucks. Why Musk’s AI or neurological companies need any such vehicles is hard to gauge.
As it happens, however, Tesla investors don’t seem to have been fazed by Bloomberg’s report. Tesla shares closed in Monday’s trading at $392.51, higher than they were on April 15, the day before Bloomberg published, when they closed at $391.95.
This wouldn’t be the first time that Musk has melded his personal interests with those of his public shareholders. The prototypical such action occurred in 2016, when he orchestrated Tesla’s purchase of his SolarCity for $2.8 billion, a 35% premium from the latter’s trading price. (Investment manager Jim Chanos, who had short positions in both companies, called the deal a “shameful example of corporate governance at its worst.”)
At the time, Tesla’s seven board seats were held by Musk and four of his cronies, including his brother Kimbal, and SolarCity’s board included Musk and two of his cousins. On that occasion, Tesla investors turned queasy, pushing Tesla shares down by more than 10% the day the deal was announced.
Musk defended the deal as a triumph of clean energy industry synergy, but one struggles to find significant gains from the linkup. Energy generation and storage, which would cover SolarCity’s business, accounted for about 13.5% of Tesla’s revenue in 2025, nearly a decade after the merger.
What role the Cybertruck — indeed, any Tesla vehicles — will play in the company’s future remains murky. Musk recently has talked about shifting the company’s focus to AI, robotaxis and humanoid robots, but these all resemble pipe dreams. AI is more and more a marketing term with less meat on its bones than the incessant publicity about it suggests and Tesla’s robotaxi venture today consists of about a dozen vehicles tooling around Austin, Texas, with human supervisors in the car or near at hand.
Musk last year projected that humanoid robots would generate “$30 trillion in revenue” for Tesla, though he acknowledged that he was “just guessing” and that there would be a “long way to go between here and making one billion robots a year.” As I’ve reported, however, even some robotics experts argue that giving workaday robots humanoid features makes no sense functionally and is likely to be abandoned once manufacturers seriously contemplate how household robots should look and function.
None of this means that Tesla might not be able to recapture its mojo in the EV market. Consumer interest in EVs tends to rise and fall in lockstep with gas prices. EV makers had a tough 2025 in the U.S. But that could turn around this year if President Trump’s Iran adventure continues to drive up the cost of oil and consequently gasoline prices at the pump.
But Tesla faces a lot more competition for EVs than it ever has in the past; other companies such as Hyundai have moved down-market and China’s BYD recently surpassed Tesla in global sales of battery-powered vehicles. BYD has been largely kept out of the U.S. market by high tariffs, but it may be impossible to keep its cars out forever. Tesla, which pioneered the EV market, may need a new model to compete with BYD and the foreign and domestic automakers already in the market, but the Cybertruck sure hasn’t been looking like its savior.
WASHINGTON — In congressional races across the country, a new crop of super PACs is taking to the air with millions of dollars worth of advertisements to sway voters.
“President Trump said it best, ‘Celeste Maloy will never let you down,’” says one advertisement supporting the Utah Republican representative in her upcoming primary election.
“Standing up to big pharma, fighting for local jobs, Val Hoyle doesn’t back down,” says an ad backing the Oregon Democratic representative ahead of her primary victory last month.
The super PACs have nondescript names — such as Jobs and Democracy PAC and American Mission — and the text is so generic that it almost seems to have been created by artificial intelligence.
That isn’t so far off the mark. The AI industry has funded the ads.
One network of super PACs is linked to Anthropic, maker of the popular AI tool Claude, and the other to Open AI, maker of ChatGPT.
They have been among the most prolific political spenders so far in the 2026 midterm elections, splashing out more than $37 million to date to influence races across the country and making the groups among the biggest outside spenders so far in congressional races. That number could grow exponentially as campaign season heats up closer to the November election — and as the Silicon Valley giants prepare initial pubic offerings that are poised to raise billions of dollars for the companies and their executives.
The AI political spending boom comes as emerging technology companies have become increasingly “comfortable with using their power to achieve a political goal,” said Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public policy executive and founder of Chamber of Progress, a technology trade group with a progressive orientation.
The leading AI companies have a history.
Anthropic was formed by former OpenAI employees who were concerned that the company was less focused on its original mission to safely harness the power of AI.
The companies are now the leading drivers of the burgeoning AI industry, and their competing views about how the technology should be regulated are playing out in a wide-ranging political ad spending war that has targeted congressional races in big cities and rural areas alike.
OpenAI thinks AI should be regulated solely at the federal level.
Anthropic calls for more stringent regulation and supports efforts by states such as New York and California that have passed more aggressive AI laws.
The groups spending in these races are super PACs, which are able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in federal races thanks to the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision.
In some races, the AI-backed political groups have spent more than the candidates they are backing.
“There was no way as a grassroots person that I could compete with that kind of money,” said Al Olszewski, whose opponent in a Montana Republican congressional primary beat him by 30 points after getting a boost from $877,000 in ads from a super PAC backed by OpenAI’s co-founder. “I got crushed.”
The AI behemoths have emphasized that they are independent from the political groups.
One group counts $25 million in support from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna, alongside $100 million tied to one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms, which holds a large stake in OpenAI. The global policy chief for OpenAI was reportedly involved in conceiving the group.
The other side has gotten $20 million from Anthropic and millions more from donors whose identities are not public.
This anonymous political cash is commonly known as dark money, and its prevalence is growing.
(Los Angeles Times photo illustration; source photos courtesy of the Tech Oversight Project)
“This has become very normalized now,” said Brendan Glavin, director of insights at OpenSecrets, which tracks campaign spending. “In 2024, we tracked over $1 billion in dark money.”
That total was $350 million higher than the previous presidential election.
The crypto playbook
The political activity of these AI companies and executives reflects a dramatic shift from how emerging technology companies have historically engaged with politics.
Google, for example, didn’t hire its first in-house Washington lobbyist until after the company had gone public in 2005.
“I think that for a long time, the tech industry lobbying strategy was just ‘leave us alone,’” Kovacevich said.
He sees the spending by these AI-linked super PACs as following the recent playbook developed by the cryptocurrency industry, which has funded the only network of political groups that has spent more on congressional races this year than those linked to OpenAI.
“I think what the crypto industry realized was that there’s no substitute for building up political power,” Kovacevich said.
The political stakes for these technology companies are significant.
“AI policy is far from settled,” said Asad Ramzanali, the former deputy director for strategy in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration and the director of artificial intelligence and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration banned foreign nationals from using the most powerful AI model developed by Anthropic — and even banned the company’s own employees from it — which forced the company to restrict access for all users.
Manhattan matchup
The two super PAC networks have largely shied away from producing ads that mention AI and have mostly chosen to avoid competing against each other in the same races.
There’s one big exception.
In the marquee Manhattan Democratic congressional primary to replace retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.), each side has spent millions of dollars.
While the field includes Kennedy scion and social media star Jake Schlossberg and former Republican turned Trump critic George Conway, the target of all the AI-backed spending has been Alex Bores, a former Palantir data scientist who now serves in the New York state Assembly.
New York congressional candidate sponsored a state measure Bores requiring major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents.
(Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)
That’s because Bores sponsored a state bill, known as the RAISE Act, that requires major AI companies to be transparent about their safety protocols and promptly report safety incidents. The bill was signed into law in December 2025.
The ads sponsored by the group tied to OpenAI, which has spent more than $7.5 million in the race, paint Bores as someone who can’t be trusted.
They cite his support from other tech billionaires, including former crypto mogul and convicted financial fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, whose super PAC spent $100,000 to support Bores in 2022 when he first ran for New York Assembly.
“Is that really who should be shaping AI safety for our kids?” one ad asks.
An ad sponsored by the Anthropic-backed network, which has also spent more than $7.5 million supporting Bores, makes the case that the bill he sponsored is exactly why he should be elected.
“As a computer engineer, Alex Bores saw how dangerous unregulated AI could be and he wrote New York’s RAISE Act to put real safeguards on A.I. and hold big tech accountable,” the ad says.
The AI ad barrage in New York has even included what might be considered a kumbaya moment in the ad wars — another super PAC created to support Bores is most heavily backed by both an employee of Anthropic and an employee of OpenAI, who both focus on AI safety.
The group, Dream NYC, has spent more than $1.7 million supporting Bores.
Bores and fellow New York State Assemblymember Micah Lasher have been atop the most recent polls in the race ahead of the June 23 primary.
A general view of businesses in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.
(Ian Maule / For The Times)
Rural Republicans
For voters in many parts of the country, the debate over AI policy has played out locally as a debate over the massive data centers required to power the technology.
In Utah, a proposed data center in Box Elder County, backed by “Shark Tank” television personality Kevin O’Leary, has generated controversy because of questions about its impact on resources in the drought-prone state and its environmental effect on the nearby Great Salt Lake.
In the state’s most competitive Republican congressional primary — the vast, newly drawn 3rd Congressional District — both candidates expressed concerns about how the project has been developed and called for greater transparency in this plan and for future data centers in the state.
Utah congressional candidates Phil Lyman and Celeste Maloy in a debate on June 1. A super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $920,000 to support Maloy.
(Rick Egan / Pool / The Salt Lake Tribune Via Associated Press)
Despite their similar position on the project, a super PAC backed by Anthropic has spent more than $950,000 to support Maloy, who is running in the new district after the boundaries of her old district changed.
“It’s a lot of money to throw at a race,” said her opponent, Phil Lyman, a former conservative Republican state Representative who ran to the right of Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox in an unsuccessful primary challenge in 2024.
Lyman insists he is no AI skeptic.
“I’m not anti data centers, I’m pro-transparency,” he said. “I think the future is bright with AI.”
The group said it is backing Maloy because it sees her as “someone who’s worked the issue” of AI regulation and who “has demonstrated leadership” with Republicans in Congress.
Maloy’s campaign didn’t respond to request for comment.
Utah congressional candidate Phil Lyman speaks during a Cottage Meeting at the SunRiver Community Center Ballroom in St. George, Utah, on Wednesday.
(Ian Maule / For The Times)
But Lyman suspects the group’s support for Maloy ahead of their June 23 primary has more to do with old-fashioned politics than any emerging technology.
One of the two co-founders of the political group is Chris Stewart, Maloy’s predecessor in Congress.
“Everything that they’re doing feels very coordinated,” Lyman said. “It makes you wonder if he’s still really controlling that seat.”
A big rig crossed the center divider on the 210 Freeway in Irwindale on Saturday morning, killing one and injuring 30, authorities said.
The mass accident took place before 9 a.m. west of Irwindale Avenue, where emergency personnel arrived to find the truck had collided with several vehicles, the Los Angeles County Fire Department said in a social media post.
One person was pronounced dead at the scene and two were critically injured. Eight minors were taken to the hospital and 22 other crash victims declined treatment, the department said.
The California Highway Patrol temporarily shut down all westbound lanes of the freeway, diverting traffic onto Irwindale Avenue, before opening up one lane.
The CHP issued a SigAlert warning of traffic delays on the westbound lanes, with two lanes on the eastbound side of the freeway also temporarily closed.
The cause of the crash is under investigation.
Ford Motor Co. is suing a prominent Los Angeles lemon law firm for allegedly inflating their fees by as much as 7,000%, the company’s latest attempt to crack down on California attorneys who it says are exploiting the state’s unique law to protect consumers from defective cars.
Quill & Arrow, a personal injury firm that represents drivers suing over so-called “lemons” — vehicles with significant, unfixable manufacturing flaws — has long been a thorn in the side of Ford. Since 2021, Ford said its has paid them more than $100 million, roughly half in attorney fees.
That profit, Ford alleges in a federal lawsuit filed Thursday, came from billing records that were “utter fabrications.”
Quill & Arrow used an overseas “army” of low-paid, non-lawyers to help file thousands of lemon lawsuits and then pretended the work was done by California attorneys, who billed as much as $950 per hour, Ford alleged in its complaint.
Ford claims that the bulk of the work was actually done by non-lawyers in countries such as Mexico and the Philippines, who got paid as little as $13 per hour.
Quill & Arrow was founded in 2019 by attorneys Kevin Jacobson and Jonathan Shirian, according to the firm’s website, which touts recovering $500 million in lemon law payouts. The partners called Ford’s lawsuit “nothing more than an attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
“It grossly mischaracterizes the facts and the claim that Quill & Arrow created fabricated attorney billing records is absurd,” the firm said in a statement.
California’s lemon law, considered one of the strongest consumer protections in the nation, allows drivers to get a refund or replacement of a broken car if the manufacturer can’t fix it. If the driver is not satisfied, they can sue.
If the driver wins, the law allows attorneys to collect their fees from the car maker — rather than take a percentage of the client’s winnings, as is common in personal injury cases. This fee structure, Ford argues, has turned the law into a bonanza for plaintiff attorneys. The longer the case drags on, the company argues, the more the law firm can reap in profit.
Ford alleges the firm intentionally slowed down its clients’ cases to drive up their billable hours, instructing drivers not to communicate with Ford and pushing them toward filing a lawsuit.
“California’s Lemon Laws are in need of reform and the courts need to exercise more oversight, given the fraud we continue to expose,” said Doug Lampe, counsel at Ford, in a statement. The law is “being blatantly abused by the lemon law plaintiffs lawyers, the bar is not policing its own and the courts need to monitor fee awards with far more skepticism and scrutiny.”
The cases, he said, “have become about the lawyers for the lawyers.”
Lemon law cases have exploded in California in the last decade from about 4,500 cases in 2015 to roughly 30,000 in 2024, according to an analysis from the Assembly Judiciary. These cases, officials warned, “are poised to cripple the entirety of California’s civil justice system.”
In 2024, the legislature tightened the state’s lemon law, requiring additional steps before a driver could sue. The bill seems to have put little dent in the caseload: Lemon lawsuits surged to record levels the following year.
Ford’s lawsuit marks the second attempt by one of America’s largest car manufacturers to go on the offense against lemon law attorneys in Southern California.
Ford sued a cohort of local lemon law firms in May 2025, accusing attorneys of collecting at least $100 million in “phantom legal fees” by billing for hours they never worked. The case, which was brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, alleged lawyers worked together to file a flurry of fraudulent cases with billable hours that defied logic.
A partner at Knight Law Group, an L.A.-based lemon law firm, once billed an “ostensibly heroic but physically impossible” 57.5-hour workday, Ford alleged.
Knight Law Group denied inflating their billing, calling the suit a “thinly veiled attempt to silence firms who would dare to hold them responsible and seek justice for consumers.”
A judge threw out the suit in March on the grounds that lawyers were protected under the 1st Amendment from being sued for the content of their lawsuits unless the case was proved fraudulent. Ford says it plans to appeal.
After Quill found about the Knight Law Group case, Ford alleged, Quill dedicated a team to “scrubbing” their own timesheets of “impossible time entries.”
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‘I got crushed’: AI giants are funding ad wars in races across the country
