The Cyber{t/c}rook Con

How One Billionaire Is Running The Oldest Grift In The Book Right Under Your Nose

Let me tell you something most people are too polite, or too distracted, to say out loud.

When a man sells a product to himself... and calls it a “sale”... and nobody bats an eye?

That’s not business genius. That’s a shell game with a $100 million price tag.

And friend, you just watched it happen.

Here’s the backstory in plain English.

Elon Musk built a truck. A big, ugly, stainless steel truck that looks like a prop from a movie nobody asked to be made.

He told the world he’d sell 250,000 of them a year. That was The Promise. That was The Vision. That’s what he sold investors on.

The actual number? Try 62,000 in a full year. That’s a 94% miss on his own target. In the truck business, that’s not a stumble. That’s a freefall.

But here’s where it gets interesting.

When your product is dying, you’ve got two choices.

You can fix it. Or you can make the numbers look better than they are.

Guess which one Musk chose.

S&P Global, not some blogger, not a short-seller, but one of the most respected financial data firms on the planet, dug into the registration records for Q4 2025.

What they found should have been front-page news.

Of the 7,071 Cybertrucks registered in the US that quarter, 1,279 of them went straight to SpaceX. Another 60 went to Musk’s other ventures: Neuralink, xAI, the rest of the empire.

That’s nearly 1 in 5 “sold” Cybertrucks going directly to companies Musk himself controls.

A hundred million dollars of product. Moved quietly. No press release. No fanfare. No disclosure.

Now here’s the thing.

Tesla is a public company. Public companies are required to disclose related-party transactions, especially ones of this size. That’s not a suggestion. That’s the law.

But you didn’t hear about this from Tesla. You found out because a third-party firm went looking.

Think about that for a second.

If I ran a hot dog stand and quietly bought 20% of my own hot dogs through a company I also owned, and then told the newspaper I was selling out every day, you’d call that fraud.

When Musk does it with trucks and billions of dollars at stake, people shrug and move on.

That’s the power of the legend. And that legend is exactly what’s being exploited here.

Now, Cox Automotive tracks actual market purchases, not just registrations.

Their Q4 2025 number? 4,140 Cybertrucks.

That’s a gap of nearly 3,000 units between “registered” and “actually sold to a real paying customer.”

Do the math: roughly 42% of Cybertrucks registered in Q4 2025 never reached a paying customer’s hands.

Not 18%. Not 20%. Forty-two percent.

That’s not a rounding error. That’s a strategy.

So why does any of this matter to you?

Because Musk isn’t just propping up a failing truck.

He’s running a test.

He’s finding out exactly how much he can move between his own companies, quietly, without disclosure, without consequence, without so much as a dip in his stock price.

And so far? The answer is: a lot.

Here’s what really makes me think.

Musk has a compensation package worth potentially $1 trillion, but only if he hits a series of almost unimaginable targets. One of them is shipping one million AI robots by 2035.

Now that he’s proven he can “sell” Cybertrucks to SpaceX without anyone raising hell... what’s to stop him from building a million useless robots and having SpaceX, freshly loaded with IPO investor cash, buy every single one?

Nothing. That’s what.

Look. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a regulator. I can’t tell you whether this crosses a legal line.

What I can tell you is this: the rules that used to separate these companies from each other are being quietly dissolved. And Musk is doing it one suspicious transaction at a time, watching to see who flinches.

Nobody has flinched yet.

That means the next move will be bigger. Bolder. More brazen.

The Cybertruck isn’t just a failed product. It’s a proof of concept for something far more troubling.

Pay attention. Ask questions. And the next time someone tells you the numbers look fine...

Check who bought them.

The precedent has been set. Now it’s a matter of what gets built on top of it.