In early 2024, I started seeing a particular Tesla Cybertruck driving around Brooklyn. It was the first one I saw – a matte black version with a sticker on the side that said “To the Moon,” a common phrase associated with cryptocurrency trading. I remember seeing it pop up in Williamsburg, Greenpoint, and scattered locations in Bedford Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. At the time, it was a novelty—the only evidence I’d seen in my little New York bubble that anyone was willing to buy these things.
Obviously people bought Cybertrucks. But not enough. In total, Tesla sold about 70,000 vehicles between their November 2023 release and Friday, when CEO Elon Musk announced the company would slow production in favor of a new autonomous taxi, the Cybercab. When the Cybertruck launched, Musk predicted it would sell 250,000 units a year, one of several confident claims by the tech billionaire that have far exceeded the target. It turns out that very few of its products actually go to the moon.
But how could we ask for a better emblem of this stupid, violent, get-rich-quick era in America? The Cybertruck was a vehicle built to the specifications of one man, who became the richest person in the world through a clever combination of government bribes, stock manipulation and viral marketing stunts. They were designed to resemble a futuristic war vehicle, manufactured in Texas in a absurdly named building called the Gigafactory, and equipped with bulletproof side panels and doors. The Cybertruck was a car built for the paranoid fantasies that gripped so much of a country destabilized by generations of economic theft. Electric to assuage the existential worry of climate change, bulletproof to match America’s extremist gun culture and pervasive fear of crime, shaped like a video game toy to appeal to the frontal lobes of a generation doused in recycled franchises of comic book heroes and supersoldiers.
They were also absolutely crappy cars. Electrical systems were prone to software bugs. Some trucks stopped completely when wet. Their odd shape and odd design made them impractical for carrying, loading, or towing anything. In 2025, the company recalled 46,000 of them because it found they had a specific piece of side panel that had fallen off due to the cold. Almost immediately after their release, automotive YouTubers and professional mechanics posted videos of Cybertrucks featuring ill-fitting bodywork and shoddy production quality, itself a common feature of Tesla’s newest vehicles. To be honest, the doors were bulletproof, provided you shoot them with a gun of a sufficiently small caliber and don’t aim at the windows.
Shortly after announcing the Cybertruck, Elon Musk made an obvious political move by supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, pouring nearly $300 million into a dark money organization called America PAC and other companies. Online, he has denounced trans people (he has a trans daughter who hates him), illegal immigration (he was born into apartheid South Africa), and “woke” politicians pushing DEI policies (his factories were allegedly hotbeds of racism and sexual harassment that resulted in multiple lawsuits). When Trump took office in 2025, Musk took on the role of head of the Department of Government Effectiveness, or DOGE, which itself was a reference to a 2010s Reddit meme about the Shiba Inu dog breed that later inspired one of the first cryptographic “shitcoins.” DOGE quickly fired thousands of federal workers, paralyzed several government agencies, and eviscerated USAID, a move that directly contributed to tens of thousands of preventable deaths overseas from disease and starvation in resource-poor regions of the developing world.
Excited morons who signed up to buy the Cybertruck found themselves having to put stickers on their bumpers saying “I bought this before Elon went crazy” to avoid getting vandalized in public. Others, like the crypto nerds and Trump-friendly bros who made up the huge middle section of the MAGA-Musk Venn diagram, often decided to double down, wrapping their Cybertrucks with right-wing stickers and tinting their windows with American flags. Simply driving one in public has become a political statement, whether the driver intended it or not: I’d be lying if I said I didn’t snicker a little every time the matte black moon mobile passed me in Brooklyn.
I admit I was predisposed to hate this thing. Ten years ago, in what seems like another lifetime, I was a tech reporter at a startup publication that catered specifically to the Cybertruck demographic (even though the truck itself didn’t exist yet). Our audiences loved Marvel movies, sci-fi nostalgia, and the techno-optimism of the Obama era. Above all, they loved Elon Musk. Musk, at the time, presented himself as a benevolent, forward-looking tech pioneer, with cameo roles in Iron Man II and an endless stream of quirky online gags, like his cars’ “Ludicrous Speed” mode and an Easter egg about the on-board computers that played the “Nyan Cat” meme. If these words don’t mean anything to you, that’s probably a good thing.
What it showed, however, was Musk’s fundamental nature as a nihilistic salesman who will say anything to sell his products, no matter how out of touch with reality. For example, in 2017, Musk said that the “fully autonomous driving” feature of his Tesla vehicles could make them capable of “hands-free cross-country travel” by the end of the year. Self-driving technology has come a long way since then, but road trips never happened. Instead, Musk turned to other programs and startups, some successfully, some not. The Cybertruck’s successor, the Cybercab, hopes to rival Google’s driverless Waymo project, although neither vehicle is yet capable of these fully autonomous road trips. Maybe in 10 years.
At this point, I’d be shocked if there were any Cybertrucks left on the road. Maybe they’ll sit on blocks in the backyards of high school dropouts who found breakout success during the crypto boom of the 2020s. It’s more likely they’ll end up on the scrapheap, their somewhat bullet-resistant steel panels crumpling or rusting while their massive lithium-ion batteries spew chemicals into the groundwater of an unfortunate community adjacent to an industrial landfill. Elon Musk, of course, will remain rich, his companies subsisting on a never-ending stream of government cash and circular stock buybacks, no matter how many elections the Democrats manage to win. But perhaps, if you squint a little, you can glimpse a different future, in which the occasional real and valuable progress made by peddlers will be used for the common good, instead of being hoarded by monopolies enabled by profit-seeking politicians. Maybe one day we’ll see the Cybertruck as a relic from a dark time in our past, not a bad omen of an even more broken future to come.
Gn bussni
