Richelieu

Musk doesn’t want the Cybertruck to go down in history as a flop, and we get it. It’s his truck. He approved the controversial design, hyped it for four years before it shipped, and boasted that 1 million reservations could translate to 5000,000 units a year. But you can’t run a line at a quarter of capacity, run “10 days only” discounts, pull trims after 173 sales, and sell trucks to your own rocket company, then turn around and tell people demand was never the issue. The data is public. Tesla’s own delivery reports are public. Our read on what happened is simple. Demand collapsed in 2025 and never came back. Tesla tried every pricing trick it had. When nothing worked, it found a future-facing reason to end it, and now it’s spinning the inevitable end-of-life rush as proof the truck was a hit all along. Musk loves a big TAM. SpaceX’s IPO filing put its total addressable market at $28.5 trillion, and last month he went further, writing that he sees “a path to SpaceX being worth orders of magnitude more than the current Earth economy.” So apply the same lens to Tesla. Pickups are one of the biggest and most profitable vehicle markets on the planet. Ford sold 801,525 F-Series trucks in the US last year, GM sold 925,656 Silverados and Sierras combined, and Ram moved 374,059. That’s more than 2.1 million trucks from three automakers, easily north of $100 billion a year at today’s transaction prices. Robotaxis? Waymo, by far the leader, is doing about 500,000 paid rides a week, and analysts estimated its revenue run rate at roughly $355 million earlier this year. Tesla doesn’t even break out robotaxi revenue and we expect it to be a fraction of Waymo’s. Maybe that flips one day. But that’s the bet here: Tesla is walking away from a giant market it can sell into today for one that only gets big if autonomy is solved in the next couple of years. Musk has made that exact bet before. He promised a million robotaxis on the road by 2020 and has said unsupervised self-driving was a year away almost every year since 2016. He’s lost every time. And that rush is real, for what it’s worth. Some people want the last of a weird, genuinely impressive truck. That doesn’t make it a business.