Musk says Tesla can't run Cybertruck and Cybercab together — not enough people

The Cybertruck's run at Giga Texas is ending, and Elon Musk says the problem isn't floor space — it's people. On Friday he said Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production around the middle of next year to make room for more Cybercab output. A day later, answering a user on X, he blamed headcount: there are only so many smart, dedicated people, and they can only do so many things. Keep the truck's production line, supply chain and engineering staffed, he said, and those people can't scale the Cybercab. By this morning he'd shifted the wording again, pointing to the opportunity cost of the Cybertruck's complexity.

The truck is Tesla's second program cut this year. In January, on the company's Q4 earnings call, Musk ended the Model S and Model X with a single word: Autonomy. The Fremont line is being converted for Optimus robots, and by April only inventory was left. The flagships had coasted since their 2021 interior refresh, and the June 2025 refresh amounted to a new paint color, a front bumper camera, a little more range and a $5,000 price increase.

Two years ago Tesla pitched a much fuller garage. Its 2024 shareholder meeting slide showed the Model 3, Model Y, Model S, Model X, Cybertruck and Semi, plus three covered vehicles Musk called pretty special. Three of those five consumer vehicles are now dead or dying. Come the second half of 2027, the lineup is Model 3 and Model Y on a shared platform, plus the Model Y L and cheaper Standard variants — with the Semi as a commercial truck, Roadster production still unresolved, and the Cybercab a steering-wheel-free robotaxi that fleet buyers can add to Tesla's Robotaxi network rather than a car anyone can purchase.

The bench Musk once bragged about has thinned badly. At Tesla's Investor Day at Giga Texas on March 1, 2023, the company sent more than a dozen executives on stage. We've obviously got significant bench strength here, Musk said at the time. Of the 14 presenters named that day, seven have since left, including investor relations chief Martin Viecha in April 2024. The departures ran batteries, powertrain, software, chips, energy, charging and finance. Seven remain per their LinkedIn profiles: Tom Zhu, Lars Moravy, Franz von Holzhausen, Ashok Elluswamy, Karn Budhiraj, Laurie Shelby and Brandon Ehrhart.

Program-level talent is where it stings most. In November 2025, Cybertruck program head Siddhant Awasthi and Model Y program manager Emmanuel Lamacchia left within a day of each other; Lamacchia had run Tesla's best-selling vehicle for four years. The Cybercab — the program Musk is now pulling people toward — has been bleeding leaders of its own, along with 17-year finance VP Sendil Palani and Thomas Dmytryk, the director who built Tesla's over-the-air update system and Robotaxi infrastructure, both in March.

For scale, Hyundai Motor Group sells more than half a dozen EV models in the US across Hyundai, Kia and Genesis on top of its gas and hybrid lines, while GM and Toyota run dozens of nameplates at once. Musk frames the cuts as focus, with autonomy as the payoff, but Tesla still isn't the leader in unsupervised driving: Waymo logs roughly seven times more driverless miles per week, and NHTSA estimates Tesla's entire Robotaxi fleet at about 1,000 vehicles, with Zoox scaling and Baidu's Apollo Go running a far bigger driverless fleet in China.