The Ballad of Twitter and that Billionaire Bumpkin, Elon Musk

Musk also defended X’s content moderation standards after Lemon highlighted antisemitic and racist posts that were still on the platform, which the Tesla CEO bought in 2022.

Asked why they had not been deleted, Musk indicated the posts were not illegal and said: “So, Don, you love censorship, is what you’re saying.” Lemon replied that he believed in moderation, to which Musk replied: “Moderation is a propaganda word for censorship.”

If a post was illegal, “we’re going to take it down”, said Musk, adding that if it did not break the law, “we’re putting our thumb on the scale or being censors”.

Tesla is overstocked with Cybertrucks, the PS1 graphics-looking mobile monument to Elon’s deep lack of creativity. With over 10,000 unsold units just sitting in dealerships, the stainless steel monstrosity has become more burden than an automotive revolution.

Despite Musk’s grand claims of selling 250,000 Cybertrucks annually, and a million reservations that may as well have been scribbled on crumpled cocktail napkins, Tesla barely eked out 6,400 Cybertruck sales in Q1 of 2025.

At this rate, they’d be lucky to hit 20,000 by year’s end. And that’s assuming the accelerator doesn’t glue itself to the floor again, or any number of the many, many shocking reasons Cybertrucks have been recalled in their brief existence.

They appear to be held together with Elmer’s glue.

Why Aren’t Tesla Cybertrucks Selling Well?

The Cybertruck, a once massively hyped vehicle that would usher in a new era for EVs, is now being called a flop. Even with massively discounted financing, Tesla can’t move these things.

It probably doesn’t help when your car has been colloquially nicknamed the “Swasticar” after the company’s CEO/mascot, Elon Musk, started aligning himself with far-right movements from the US to Germany.

The truck has become a rolling burning effigy in global protests, thanks to Musk’s charming blend of associating himself with fascists while helping the Trump administration slash and burn the federal government for no reason other than, seemingly, to consolidate power.

Combine that with Tesla’s worst sales in Europe in years and a rollback of Cybertruck production, and it’s easy to see why Cybertrucks are just sitting around, waiting for someone to officially label them the DeLorean of the 21st century.

Desperate to offload inventory, Tesla dropped a “cheaper” $69,990 Rear Wheel Drive version in April that comes with fewer features and—one assumes a complimentary disclaimer, or maybe even a guarantee, that something on this thing will fall off within a few months.

It feels like white flags are being waved all over the place, especially as Tesla redirects workers from Cybertruck production back to the Model Y. While we can’t yet write Cybertruck’s obituary, the prognosis is grim.

What was once marketed as the future of transportation now feels like a midlife crisis on wheels. It has simultaneously become a Swasticar and a Gen-Xer divorcemobile, a pair of reputation-ruining associations that will take a miracle to recover from.

The story of the Casspir, which patrolled townships in South Africa when the Tesla CEO was a boy.


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Whether or not this was intentional, the Cybertruck’s harsh, sharp edges remind us, instead, of something from the past: the larger armored personnel vehicles that patrolled streets throughout Musk’s youth in apartheid South Africa. In the 1980s, the Casspir proliferated across the country, moving from the battlefield and onto the streets. Initially improvised as a way to circumvent international sanctions against the apartheid government, the Casspir mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle was invented and produced domestically. It was a rugged all-terrain vehicle intended to withstand gunfire and mine explosions. It could drive up to 60 mph and be modified to add artillery functions.

Eventually, the Casspir was deployed to patrol townships, the residential neighborhoods where many Black South Africans lived. As violence and flames engulfed the streets of the nation, Black South African children like Irvin drew and wrote about the apartheid security forces and its tools—dogs and Casspirs—chasing and shooting at them in their schools, streets, and homes. By the 1990s, the Casspir had become an iconic global symbol of apartheid oppression.

Musk would have likely seen the Casspir vehicles in the South Africa of his childhood. He was born in Pretoria, one of the nation’s three capitals, during apartheid, in June 1971. When he was 5 years old, tens of thousands of Black South African children protested the government’s policy to impose Afrikaans, the Dutch-based language of the apartheid state, in schools. In Soweto, where Irvin lived, the South African police fired bullets into a crowd of unarmed, protesting children, killing scores of them. This episode became known as the Soweto uprising. It was one of many massacres.
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