Elon Musk says Tesla must refund Cybertruck deposits to ‘a lot of people’; he touted 250K reservations back in 2019 Becky Robertson Mon, November 9, 2026 at 6:15 PM EST 4 min read TSLA +5.76% Trade Tesla on Coinbase Trading disclosure Trading disclosure The above button links to Coinbase. Yahoo Finance is not a broker-dealer or investment adviser and does not offer securities or cryptocurrencies for sale or facilitate trading. Coinbase pays us for certain activity generated through this link. Prices displayed are informational.
Following Tesla's announcement that it will cease production of its famed Cybertruck just three and a half years after the space-age model made its disruptive debut, the EV titan is preparing to process refunds to customers who had put down deposits for a 2027 delivery. And apparently, there are "a lot."
CEO Elon Musk wrote in an X post on Sunday that demand for the stainless-steel pickups is now outpacing the rate at which Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) can make them at its factory and global headquarters in Austin, which is the only hub that manufactures the vehicle.
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"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," he wrote in the post, which came two days after he broke the hearts of Cybertruck fans with the initial news of its end to make way for fabrication of the flashy new autonomous Cybercab.
The brand's website currently states that reservation "pre-order payments" are fully refundable up until the car's shipping date.
But there has been some confusion between the initial reservation fee and the order fee that a client pays once they reach the front of the reservation waitlist and are able to customize their vehicle.
Reservations opened up when the truck was first unveiled in 2019 for a mere $100 USD, a tiny fraction of the $60,990 to $120,000 price tag of the angular, head-turning set of wheels.
This price was briefly bumped to $250 when the first of them began hitting the roads at the end of 2023. Then in August 2024, the reservation system was done away with entirely, and direct orders were opened up to the general public without any waiting period. The fee to configure and lock in a Cybertruck, the order fee, was also set at $250, and was non-refundable at the time.
Of course, now that Tesla is the one cancelling orders, these funds will be returned to would-be Cybertruck owners.
According to the latest sales figures via Bloomberg, a total of 7,133 of the machines were purchased in the U.S. during the first five months of this year, compared to the 250,000 Musk touted in 2019. But, the model's discontinuation has prompted a reported surge in interest.
It's unclear how much of that interest has translated into actual orders, but in Musk's tweet, he did state that shifts are being ramped up at the Texas plant, as the order backlog for the truck "is currently far more than we can make before dismantling the line for Cybercab expansion around June/July next year."
The model usually takes between a few weeks and a few months from order to shipment, depending on trim. Orders for multiple variations have been paused.
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Despite rampant speculation and data showing that Cybertruck purchases have fallen year-over-year since 2023, the tech mogul insists that winding down operations is simply a matter of limited factory capacity and the opportunity cost.
"This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production," Musk wrote in his post Sunday.
Many fans have taken to socials to lament the termination of the polarizing auto — and agree with its maker's assertion that "there will never be another vehicle like it."
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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: Elon Musk says Tesla must refund Cybertruck deposits to 'a lot of people'; he touted 250K reservations back in 2019
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