Jonathan V. Last
Editor at The Bulwark who writes the Triad, a daily column on Donald Trump, Republican politics and the news cycle, and answers reader questions in the Triad Ma...
“The sales are almost entirely to other Musk companies. So it's become a fleet car for Elon Musk companies and for the federal government when Musk was still in good graces in Trumpland. Honestly, the fact that it continued in production for this long was just Musk's vanity. If this was GM or Ford, they would have killed it after like 24 months.”
The Bulwark · Policy · November 2026
Context
Tesla had just announced it will wind down Cybertruck production at its Texas factory. The co-host explains why the truck failed commercially, pointing to build quality, collapsing used values and who actually bought it.
Transcript
…The actual build quality on the thing is legendarily terrible. Yeah, there were 11 recalls, 11 recalls. Not even the recall, just like things like panel gaps, right? If you ever went up to one in a parking lot and looked at it, like the gaps in the panels are like this big. And like the wheels were
literally falling off in, I think the last recall.
Terribly, terribly sold. And to the point where over the last year, if you look at them on the used market, the values of the cyber truck and used market are in the toilet. And the sales are almost entirely to other Musk companies. So it's become a fleet car for Elon Musk companies and for the federal government when Musk was still in good graces in Trumpland. So there was nothing there for this thing. And this boondoggle has been finally put out of its misery. Honestly, the fact that it continued in production for this long was just Musk's vanity. If this was like GM or Ford, they would have killed it after like 24 months. They would have been like, nope, this didn't work. Sorry. And it's nice. I mean, it is a weird thing that this was a vehicle that people bought in order to give the finger to other people. That was the only reason to own one of these things. It didn't make any financial sense. It didn't make any vehicular sense. It didn't make any automotive sense. It was almost literally like cutting off your nose to spite your face because they were such terrible vehicles. Anyway, and this then also, as somebody notes in…
Well, we're going to get Tesla and SpaceX. We're going to get to that. Which is also
great. And he says he's switching to the cyber cab. That's what he's going to switch production to. And let me promise you, this is another Musk promise, which is going to go nowhere. The cyber cab is a ludicrous product which will not work, which cannot work, and which is designed again from…
Yeah, again, this I feel like is very representative of the Trump era. And maybe I'm just like trying to force this framework on it, but I really think it's true. Like you said, this is a product that was designed to be sold to people who wanted to give other people the finger, that that was more…
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