00:00 Speaker A
Nearly one in five Cybertrucks they say, sold last quarter, went to Elon’s own companies. They say, if you strip out those sort of internal purchases, Pras, Cybertruck sales would have actually dropped more than 50%. What is going on there?
00:23 Pras
Uh that’s a surprising amount. I mean, I guess it’s you’re comparing it maybe to a low base last year and uh, you know, I think it was over 1,300 vehicles sold, something like that to SpaceX. and, you know, I’m not surprised that we’re seeing SpaceX buy these vehicles from Musk’s company, right? They need these vehicles for at Starbase and places like that. Why not buy the vehicles from Musk’s own other carmaker?
00:54 Pras
Well, if you’re a SpaceX investor, you say, hey, there should be an arm’s length transaction here. Why don’t you put this bid out? Maybe we buy a Ford, 1,000 Ford F-150s, I don’t know, you know. So I think there’s a little bit of uh why are they buying the Cybertrucks? Secondly, you were asking about this before, what does it say about Cybertruck demand? Is it is it really not great? And I think that uh the EV demand in general is sort of kind of tailed off a bit. and you’re talking about a a pickup truck that cost $60,000 as an EV. Secondly, you know, how many people who buy work trucks want to have an EV? That’s that’s the debatable question. So I think that it’s a combination of, look, the thing looks polarizing, but it’s pretty capable and we’re talking about EVs for larger trucks are not the best fit for that sort of powertrain. So, it’s a lot going on there, but it’s it is notable that SpaceX bought a bunch of these.
01:46 Speaker A
And I I guess there there was probably some Tesla investors and shareholders listening to us right now, probably rolling their eyes because for them, I mean, Cybertruck isn’t why they’re in this name.
01:58 Pras
Right, right. But but and then I just saw Tesla tweeting today about how Cybertruck is now the the the premier vehicle for them because you know, the Model S and Model X are going away. This this is the top dog now is Cybertruck. So, uh got to beef up those sales.
