Musk's own companies bought 18% of Cybertruck sales last quarter

Tesla's Cybertruck sales collapsed 48% last year — but you wouldn't know it from the company's order books alone. SpaceX bought 1,279 Cybertrucks in Q4 2025, accounting for roughly 18% of all quarterly sales, according to registration data. Together with purchases from xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink, Elon Musk's network of companies has sent about $890 million to Tesla since 2023 — propping up numbers that would otherwise look considerably worse.

The fleet play

SpaceX spent $131 million on Cybertrucks in 2025 alone. To put that in context: total Cybertruck registrations fell from roughly 39,000 in 2024 to just over 20,000 in 2025 — a drop that would have been even starker without the internal fleet orders. All transactions are disclosed as related-party deals and are said to be conducted at market rates, but analysts have raised concerns. Morningstar's equity strategist described the spending pattern as "a little unique," and critics note that undisclosed pricing terms make it hard to verify whether these are genuine arm's-length transactions.

The energy side of the equation

Cybertrucks are only part of the story. Tesla's Megapack battery systems — large-scale energy storage units used for grid and industrial applications — have become a major revenue line driven almost entirely by internal demand. xAI purchased $697 million worth of Megapacks across 2024 and 2025 to power its Colossus AI supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee. That single customer relationship helped Tesla's energy division grow 27% in 2025 — even as automotive revenue fell 10%, per Tesla's SEC filings.

Governance red flags

The scale of intra-company business creates a structural question: how much of Tesla's reported revenue reflects genuine external demand? The company's overall revenue declined in 2025 for the first time on record. Without SpaceX and xAI orders, both the automotive and energy segments would look weaker. The related-party transactions were disclosed in SpaceX's S-1 IPO filing, which brought the details into public view — but the pricing terms remain opaque, and no regulator has formally challenged the arrangements. For now, Musk's empire operates as a closed loop: SpaceX and xAI get vehicles and power infrastructure, Tesla gets the revenue figures it needs.