Elon Musk says Tesla has more Cybertruck orders than it can build before the Giga Texas line shuts down, so a lot of buyers will get their deposits back instead of a truck. He also pushed back on the idea that the pickup is being dropped because it loses money.
“The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate,” Musk wrote on X on Monday, Nov. 9, at 2:20 AM ET (11:20 PM PT Sunday, Nov. 8; 4:20 PM JST Monday). “We will try to make as many as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people.”
The second half of the post went after the coverage of last week’s news. “This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media,” he wrote, “but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.”
He didn’t say how many orders are outstanding, how many deposits will go back, or how Tesla will decide who still gets a truck. Tesla hasn’t issued a statement. Business Insider reported that the company still appeared to be taking orders on its website.
Four days, four posts
Monday’s post caps a busy stretch. On Friday, Nov. 6, at 1:30 AM ET (3:30 PM JST), Musk said Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas “around the middle of next year” to make room for more Cybercabs, which we covered in our Nov. 6 story. Early Saturday he told tech blogger Robert Scoble that Tesla is “still building Cybertruck for another 8 or 9 months.”
Saturday afternoon, at 1:12 PM ET (3:12 AM JST Sunday, Nov. 8), he got more specific. The backlog “is currently far more than we can make before dismantling the line for Cybercab expansion around June/July next year,” he posted, and Tesla “will add an extra shift to try to get all orders done in time.” Not a Tesla App noted the extra shift fits earlier reports that Giga Texas was adding a night shift. Monday is the first time Musk has said plainly that the extra shift won’t be enough.
The dates line up. Eight months from Nov. 9 lands around July 9, 2027, inside the “June/July” window. Eight or nine months from Nov. 7 runs from early July to early August. So “the middle of next year” now looks like roughly July 2027 for the last trucks off the line, give or take a few weeks.
Where the backlog came from
That a backlog exists at all is the odd part. Musk once talked about 250,000 Cybertrucks a year. U.S. sales fell 48% to 20,237 last year, according to Kelley Blue Book figures cited by Reuters. Cox Automotive’s third-quarter estimates put U.S. Cybertruck sales at 4,323 from July through September and 11,586 for the first nine months of 2026. Tesla doesn’t break the truck out in its own numbers. Its “other models” line, which lumps Cybertruck with the now-discontinued Model S and Model X, came to 8,295 deliveries worldwide in the third quarter, Kelley Blue Book notes.
Not a Tesla App thinks much of the queue is the Dual Motor All-Wheel Drive trim, which launched at $59,990 in February before Tesla raised the price. Estimated delivery dates for new orders had slipped into 2027 by March. Tesla has since paused new Dual Motor orders and lifted the other trims: Premium All-Wheel Drive now starts at $92,490 and Cyberbeast at $102,490. A closing date also tends to pull buyers in. “Get it while you can,” Tesla AI commentator James Douma wrote in the post Musk quoted on Monday.
The profit question
Musk’s case is about people and floor space, not margins. In a Saturday reply (2:39 PM ET Nov. 7 / 4:39 AM JST Nov. 8) he wrote that “there are a very limited number of smart, dedicated people! They can only do so many things. If we have to maintain a complex production line, supply chain and allocate engineering for Cybertruck, we can’t use those people or factory space and machinery for scaling Cybercab.” In the same post he said efficiency gains will allow a 40 kWh Cybercab pack, offered in liquid silver.
Tesla doesn’t report Cybertruck profit on its own, so there’s no official figure to check that claim against. What’s clear is the choice. Tesla would rather hand money back to buyers who want a truck than keep a stainless-steel line, its supply chain and its engineers tied up into the second half of 2027.
For people who already own one, Musk said on Nov. 6 that “the Cybertruck fleet will be around for a long time.” For people still waiting, the open questions are practical ones: which orders get built, in what order, and when Tesla tells everyone else.
The EVX Take
Both things can be true. Musk says the Cybertruck isn’t unprofitable, and the truck can make money on every sale and still lose the contest for floor space to a Cybercab that Tesla expects to earn fares around the clock. The order surge also looks partly like a last-chance rush. Before the wind-down news, the truck was selling a few thousand a quarter in the U.S., a long way from the 250,000 a year Musk once floated, and if it were selling anywhere near that pace it’s hard to see Tesla giving up the line. Japan never got the Cybertruck, so the part that matters here is the robotaxi: a smaller 40 kWh Cybercab built for volume, arriving just as Japan writes rules for vehicles with no steering wheel (MLIT’s December path).
Sources: Elon Musk on X (Nov. 9, Nov. 7 backlog, Nov. 7 reply, Nov. 7 to Robert Scoble, Nov. 6); Not a Tesla App; Reuters via Investing.com; Business Insider; Kelley Blue Book; Cox Automotive Q3 EV sales report.
— The EVX News team
Featured image: a 2024 Tesla Cybertruck with its light bar on at dusk in Moab, Utah, Dec. 29, 2023. Photo: A1C6 / Wikimedia Commons (CC0, cropped and resized).
