SpaceX Bought 18% of Tesla Cybertrucks Sold in US During Q4 2025, Data Shows

SpaceX bought 1,279 Cybertrucks in Q4 2025, and Musk-controlled entities accounted for 1,339 of 7,071 U.S. Cybertruck registrations, about 19% of the quarter total. The article highlights weakening external demand: U.S. Cybertruck deliveries fell 45.1% year over year to 3,519 in Q1 2026 and Tesla sold just over 20,300 units in 2025, down 48.1% from the prior year. The cheaper $59,990 trim has since risen to $69,990, with first deliveries now pushed to 2027 for new orders.

Analysis

The key second-order signal is not just weak consumer adoption, but weak genuine price discovery: when a flagship product needs related-party demand to stabilize registrations, the market is telling you external elasticity is worse than headline unit data suggests. That matters because Tesla’s Cybertruck is sitting on the wrong side of a classic premium-product adoption curve: the early enthusiast base is saturated, while the broader pool is resisting the design, utility tradeoffs, and price—even after repeated trim reshuffles.

The bigger implication is on manufacturing efficiency and mix. A 125k-unit Texas capacity base against sub-25k annual US run-rate means fixed-cost absorption on the program is likely deteriorating, not improving; every underutilized unit pushes more overhead into the broader automotive margin stack. The cheaper trim delay is also a problem: if order books are being quoted into 2027, Tesla has effectively traded price cuts for queue management, which may protect ASP optics near term but does nothing to solve the demand gap before the next earnings season.

For competitors, the near-term beneficiary is not another pickup EV brand so much as the broader internal-combustion truck ecosystem and hybrid pickup share, which gets to retain skeptical buyers who might otherwise have cross-shopped Cybertruck on novelty. The more important supply-chain read-through is for specialty stainless, low-volume EV exteriors, and Texas labor utilization: weak Cybertruck absorption reduces incremental pull on those suppliers and raises the odds Tesla shifts engineering and capex toward more conventional, higher-volume platforms. That would be a tacit admission that the product is a branding exercise, not a scalable profit center.

The contrarian risk is that the market already knows Cybertruck is a niche product, so the stock impact may be muted unless this starts contaminating broader Tesla demand perception. The real catalyst to watch over the next 1-2 quarters is whether the cheaper trim’s delayed delivery window pushes reservation holders into cancellations, which would expose demand softness just as Tesla needs a fresh volume narrative. If that happens, the issue stops being Cybertruck-specific and becomes a valuation multiple problem for the whole vehicle franchise.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Maintain/trim TSLA short exposure into any strength over the next 4-8 weeks; use rallies tied to delivery optimism to add, since the next leg of downside likely comes from mix and margin disappointment rather than headline unit misses.
• Structure a TSLA put spread targeting the next earnings window: buy 6-9 month downside protection and finance with a lower strike; risk/reward is favorable if the market starts pricing in cancellation risk on the delayed lower-priced trim.
• Pair trade: short TSLA / long a diversified legacy pickup beneficiary basket (e.g., F, GM) for 1-3 months; the trade expresses weakening EV pickup conversion while avoiding broad auto beta.
• If TSLA implied volatility compresses after the next print, consider owning puts on a 2-4 week horizon into any commentary on Cybertruck order delays; the setup is best when the stock appears stabilized but forward delivery windows are deteriorating.
• Reduce exposure to EV supplier names levered to low-volume premium programs unless they have meaningful non-Tesla diversification; the demand issue here is product-specific but the capex reallocation risk is company-wide.