SpaceX acquires nearly one-fifth of the US Cybertruck sales, Elon Musk "left hand to right hand" supporting over 100 million dollars in sales

Author: Friday, Deep Tide TechFlow

Deep Tide Guide: According to registration data from S&P Global Mobility, SpaceX purchased 1,279 Cybertrucks in Q4 2025, accounting for 18% of all registrations in the U.S. during the same period.

Including purchases by companies like xAI, Musk’s affiliated companies collectively took about 19% of the quarterly sales. After stripping out related-party transactions, the registered volume of Cybertruck in that quarter actually plummeted by 51% year-over-year.

Musk’s companies are becoming the largest buyers of the Cybertruck.

According to Bloomberg on April 16, registration data from S&P Global Mobility shows that in Q4 2025, a total of 7,071 Cybertrucks were registered in the U.S., with SpaceX alone purchasing 1,279 units, accounting for over 18%. Simultaneously, xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink bought an additional 60 units, totaling 1,339 units, roughly 19% of the total registrations in Q4. Based on an estimated starting price of around $70k, the total value of these related-party transactions likely exceeded $100 million.

AutoForecast Solutions Vice President of Global Automotive Forecasting, Sam Fiorani, told Bloomberg: “Tesla’s Cybertruck is losing buyers.” Neither Tesla, Musk, nor SpaceX responded to requests for comment.

Excluding related-party purchases, the actual decline of Cybertruck registrations is 51%

If we exclude the purchases by Musk’s companies, the Cybertruck’s registration volume in Q4 would have dropped by 51% year-over-year.

Electrek has been tracking this phenomenon since October last year, when photos showed large numbers of Cybertrucks being transported to SpaceX’s facility at Starbase, Texas. Cybertruck chief engineer Wes Morrill confirmed on social media that SpaceX is using Cybertrucks to “replace support fleet vehicles.” A documentary on the YouTube channel NASA Space Flight also captured rows of Cybertrucks parked inside SpaceX’s facilities.

Related-party purchases continued after Q4. According to the same dataset, Musk’s companies registered another 158 units in January 2026 and 67 units in February.

From nearly 40k units sold annually to 20k, Cybertruck only achieved 8% of its target

According to Cox Automotive data, approximately 38,965 Cybertrucks were sold in the U.S. in 2024, making it the best-selling pure electric pickup truck that year. But in 2025, sales sharply dropped to about 20,300 units, a 48.1% year-over-year decline, only 8.1% of Musk’s promised annual production target of 250k units set in 2019.

The situation worsened in 2026. In Q1, only 3,519 units were delivered in the U.S., the lowest since deliveries began, down 45.1% year-over-year. Although Tesla launched a record-low starting price version at $59,990 in February, the first deliveries are not expected to begin until June, and pre-orders are already pushed out to 2027.

Related-party transactions raise governance concerns

The controversy around this transaction centers on transparency. SpaceX is not a publicly listed company, so these purchases are not required to be disclosed like fleet orders from Hertz or Uber. From an external perspective, a private company is absorbing inventory that a publicly traded company cannot sell, while both share the same CEO.

Cross-company business relationships involving Musk’s companies are not new: xAI uses Tesla Megapack batteries, Grok has been integrated into Tesla vehicles, and Tesla and SpaceX are collaborating on chip projects. However, selling a slow-selling model on a large scale to related companies controlled by the same CEO remains rare in the automotive industry.

Tesla faces a third consecutive year of declining annual sales, having been overtaken by BYD last year to lose its global EV sales crown. Its stock price has fallen about 20% since reaching a record high in mid-December last year. Whether the $60k Cybertruck can truly stimulate external demand remains the most critical test moving forward.