This Man Is Live-Tweeting the Tesla Cybertruck's Downfall

Allow me to set a scene: Los Angeles, California, March 3. Flashing red and blue lights cast a cinematic glow over the iconic Beverly Hills Hotel sign. The lush greenery that surrounds the sign is crushed and crumpled against the front end of a vehicle that's hopped the concrete wall to crash into the sign at apparent high speed. Notably, the car isn't any ordinary car, but a Tesla Cybertruck. The scene paints a near-perfect picture of the reputation of the controversial vehicle and its manufacturer.

This crash and many, many other incidents are chronicled by Rolling Stone reporter and self-identified Tesla hater Miles Klee in a highly popular, ever-updating thread on Elon Musk's own social-media site, X. Since February 2024, Klee has been compiling a record of the Cybertruck's woes posted on social media and Cybertruck owner forums. Klee frequently writes about internet fandoms, viral phenomena, and "the weirdo radicalized billionaire beat," so he was prepared for the Cybertruck to have issues once it got out on the road. He started frequenting the Cybertruck subreddit and noticed that buyers were reporting issues with their Cybertrucks practically immediately after purchase.

"I think that we wouldn't really know the extent to which this thing has failed if it weren't for the fact that such a high proportion of those owners are invested in showing it off on social media," Klee told Road & Track. "You wouldn't know how bad it's gotten, except whenever one of these things breaks down, they always get online and start complaining about it, with pictures, with video, all of it."

Take the Beverly Hills Hotel sign crash for example. The original poster, X user @jackdidthatt, initially said that "the beverly hills hotel valet just crashed my friends brand new cyber truck outside pulling it around." After the valet company denied responsibility and asked for the post to be taken down, the original poster clarified that his friend crashed the car himself, writing, "we thought it would be funny to say it was valet and not our friend who just crashed his new cyber truck... BHH is not at fault!" Beverly Hills Police Department confirmed that the owner crashed the truck and "unsafe speed" was partially to blame for the accident.

"I think that [incident] is a personal favorite," Klee said. "That was such a striking image. I felt like that was the moment where the thread really started to take off."

And take off it has—at time of publication, Klee has racked up 133 posts in the thread over four months, with installments averaging roughly 30,000 views and at most 2.7 million views. Scrolling from the most recent post to the top of the thread is a serious time commitment and an experience that feels somewhere between reading an extensively researched diagnostic report of a multilayered catastrophe and settling in with popcorn to watch a Looney Tunes version of Titanic.

As you scroll, you'll start to recognize frequently appearing characters, like the guy who broke his finger after sticking it in the Cybertruck's trunk-closure mechanism, and frequently appearing complaints, including that the truck attracts too much attention, can injure owners with seemingly innocuous parts like the door, cannot handle off-road activity as promised (not to be confused with on-road activity), and begins malfunctioning as soon as one block after delivery.

Tesla did not respond to R&T's request for comment on these alleged issues or this story.

According to Klee, the reaction to the thread has been largely positive with minimal interaction from what he calls "Musk fanboys" or "Tesla dudes," though he suspects that some of them are watching what he posts without engaging. Klee said posts to the Cybertruck thread tend to reach a wider audience than his typical posts on X, and he plans to keep the thread going with updates for new incidents.

"I don't really know what the end point of [the thread] could be," said Klee. "I think it would have to be, like, they actually stop production from Tesla's catalog—which feels like it could happen any minute now, honestly."

If it does happen, we'll have 133 posts on X and counting to serve as an obituary for the Cybertruck's troubled lifespan, thanks to one bored reporter and an assortment of distraught early adopters.

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