Musk says Tesla will refund some Cybertruck deposits, defends decision to end production

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is defending the Cybertruck and the company’s decision to stop producing the polarizing steel-clad truck, claiming that the order rate far exceeds its production.

Tesla will shut down production of the Cybertruck in about eight months Musk said in an X post on Monday. He also said the company will try to make as many of the vehicles as possible before then, though Tesla will “have to return deposits for a lot of people.”

Musk argued the Cybertruck was not unprofitable, and that Tesla was ending production because the “opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.”

In other words, Musk is arguing that Tesla can make more money by using the factory space and resources dedicated to the Cybertruck for building Cybercab robotaxis. Musk said last week that Tesla plans to use the factory space to build more two-seater Cybercabs.

The first Cybertrucks were delivered to customers in late 2023, when it seemed like it could be a breakthrough hit for the company. Reservations for the vehicle had ballooned to 1 million, according to Musk, who also predicted that the company would sell around 250,000 of the trucks annually.

But those reservations never translated into actual sales. Tesla doesn’t break out sales of the Cybertrucks, but industry experts estimate a total of about 71,000 Cybertrucks have been sold since the first deliveries began in November 2023.

Many of those sales came from inside Musk’s ecosystem of other businesses. For instance, SpaceX (now known as SpaceXSI), which he also leads and is the largest shareholder of, purchased $131 million worth of Cybertrucks from Tesla in 2025, according to the company’s S-1 registration statement ahead of its IPO. Another Musk company, xAI, also bought $430 million worth of Tesla Megapacks for its data centers, before it merged with SpaceX.

But sales of the Cybertruck, which lagged for months, could see a final bump now that it’s going out of production. Still, even a scarcity boost is unlikely to push the truck’s demand to the lofty projections from several years ago.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.

Kirsten Korosec is a reporter and editor who has covered the future of transportation from EVs and autonomous vehicles to urban air mobility and in-car tech for more than a decade. She is currently the transportation editor at TechCrunch and co-host of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast. She is also co-founder and co-host of the podcast, “The Autonocast.” She previously wrote for Fortune, The Verge, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and CBS Interactive.

You can contact or verify outreach from Kirsten by emailing [email protected] or via encrypted message at kkorosec.07 on Signal.