Tesla Cybertruck sales inflated: SpaceX bought 1,279 units

New registration data confirms what Electrek has been reporting for six months: Tesla’s Cybertruck sales are being propped up by Elon Musk’s other companies. SpaceX alone bought 1,279 Cybertrucks in Q4 2025 — 18% of every Cybertruck registered in the US that quarter.

Without those inter-company purchases, Cybertruck registrations would have fallen 51% year-over-year instead of the numbers Tesla reported.

The figures come from S&P Global Mobility registration data first reported by Bloomberg’s Dana Hull. Of the 7,071 Cybertrucks registered in the US during the fourth quarter, 1,279 went to SpaceX. Another 60 units were registered to Musk’s other ventures — xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink — bringing the Musk-entity total to 1,339 vehicles, or roughly 19% of Q4 registrations.

At the Cybertruck’s Q4 2025 pricing, that’s well over $100 million in revenue that Tesla effectively booked by selling trucks to companies Elon Musk controls.

The numbers Electrek has been chasing since October

Electrek first reported in October 2025 that truckloads of Cybertrucks were being delivered to SpaceX’s Starbase facility and to xAI offices, based on photos and a confirmation from Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill that SpaceX and Tesla were “replacing support fleets” with the vehicle.

In December, we estimated SpaceX had bought over 1,000 Cybertrucks — with the real number potentially reaching 2,000 — at a cost somewhere between $80 million and $160 million. At the time, we had visual evidence but no registration data to pin down the exact figure.

Now we do. SpaceX’s 1,279 Q4 purchases land squarely in the middle of that estimate, and the S&P Global Mobility data — the gold standard for US vehicle registration counts — confirms the scale of the arrangement.

The purchases didn’t stop in Q4. According to the same dataset, Musk’s companies bought another 158 Cybertrucks in January 2026 and 67 in February 2026.

What the pace actually is without SpaceX

Tesla originally projected 250,000 Cybertrucks sold per year. The current pace, after stripping out the inter-company purchases, is closer to 20,000 — less than 10% of what Musk told investors to expect.

Sam Fiorani of AutoForecast Solutions put it to Bloomberg bluntly: “Tesla is running out of buyers for the Cybertruck.”

The product has been in structural decline for over a year. The Ford F-150 Lightning outsold the Cybertruck in 2025 before Ford discontinued the Lightning for not selling enough. Tesla has tried raising prices to create artificial urgency, shipping the truck to the Middle East, and suggesting unsold units could be repurposed for cargo delivery.

None of it worked. The inventory problem got bad enough that Musk’s own companies became Tesla’s single largest Q4 customer.

The $60,000 Cybertruck changes the denominator

One critical caveat: these numbers cover Q4 2025, January, and February 2026 — a period when the cheapest Cybertruck started at $80,000.

On February 19, Tesla launched a new AWD Cybertruck at $60,000 — the lowest price the truck has ever been offered at — and cut the Cyberbeast by $15,000 to $100,000. That means the truly interesting test of consumer demand hasn’t happened yet. Q2 2026 is the first full quarter where a meaningfully cheaper Cybertruck is available to real buyers.

If the new AWD version genuinely opens up demand, the SpaceX-dependent share of sales should collapse. If it doesn’t, the Cybertruck story is even worse than the Q4 data suggests — because Tesla will have cut margins and still needed Musk’s companies to hit the numbers.

Electrek’s Take

We’ve been reporting on this since October, and it’s satisfying to finally have the S&P Global Mobility number to attach to what was, until today, a story built on truck-spotting and engineer tweets. 1,279 Cybertrucks to SpaceX in a single quarter.

The arrangement raises obvious questions about how Tesla accounts for vehicles sold to entities Elon Musk controls. SpaceX is not publicly traded, so those purchases don’t get disclosed in the way a fleet deal with Hertz or Uber would. From the outside, it looks like a private company (SpaceX) is absorbing inventory that a public company (Tesla) couldn’t move, at prices Tesla set, benefiting Tesla’s reported revenue and production numbers during a quarter where Tesla otherwise faced a 51% Cybertruck registration collapse.

The $60,000 AWD Cybertruck is the real test. It launched in late February, so Q1 2026 numbers will still be mostly full-price inventory, but Q2 will be the first clean read on whether actual consumers want this truck at a price closer to what Musk originally promised.