Tesla‘s Chief Executive Elon Musk claimed on X this Sunday that the company’s sales rose after President Donald Trump ended the federal electric vehicle tax credit on September 30, 2025.
Musk reacted to a CNN article by Chris Isidore examining how government support shaped his path to becoming the world’s first trillionaire.
The piece, published last Friday, detailed how SpaceX received more than $500 million in early NASA grants and how Tesla benefited from a $465 million federal loan and billions in regulatory credit sales.
Democratic Senator Ed Markey shared the article on X, writing that the government subsidies represent taxpayers’ money, to which Republican Senator Mike Lee replied in defense of the Tesla CEO.
Elon Musk then posted his own response, calling the article “totally false” and arguing that government incentives received by his companies amount to less than 2% of SpaceX and Tesla‘s combined value.
SpaceX went public last Friday, closing the first session 19% higher — making Musk the world’s first ever trillionaire.
He went further, claiming the incentives disproportionately helped competitors and that Tesla sales “actually INCREASED” after Trump removed the $7,500 credit.
Cox Automotive Data
The $7,500 federal EV tax credit — introduced under the Inflation Reduction Act and expanded under the Biden Administration — was terminated on September 30, 2025, after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law on July 4, 2025.
Musk himself had advocated for the elimination of all government subsidies in a November 2024 post on X.
Quarterly sales estimates from Cox Automotive‘s Kelley Blue Book — the industry’s most widely cited source for US EV registration data — show Tesla‘s domestic volumes fell sharply after the credit ended.
In the third quarter of 2025, the last period in which the incentive was available, Tesla sold 179,525 vehicles in the United States.
Demand surged ahead of the September 30 deadline, pushing the company to its highest quarterly US total and the broader market to an EV share peak of 10.6%.
Once the credit expired, Tesla‘s US sales dropped to 138,000 in the fourth quarter of 2025 — a 23.1% decline from the prior quarter.
Sales fell further to 117,300 in the first quarter of 2026, bringing the cumulative decline since the credit ended to 34.6%.
On a year-over-year basis, first-quarter sales dropped 8.4% from the 128,100 units registered in the same period of 2025.
Monthly data from Motor Intelligence shows Tesla‘s US sales have now declined year over year for eight consecutive months through May 2026.
Market Share Rose, However
Musk’s claim could have stemmed from one metric that did move in Tesla‘s favor: segment share.
The broader EV market contracted even more steeply than Tesla‘s sales after the credit ended, which led the company’s share of US EV sales to climb from 41.0% in the third quarter of 2025 to 58.9% in the fourth quarter of 2025 and 54.2% in the first quarter of 2026.
A year earlier, Tesla held 43.2% of the market.
Cox Automotive data shows the total US EV market fell from 437,487 units in the third quarter of 2025 to 234,171 in the fourth quarter and 216,399 in the first quarter of 2026.
The organization described the first quarter as “a necessary reset” for a market adjusting to the absence of federal incentives.
Rivian and Lucid Outpace Tesla
Among the three US-based pure-play EV makers, Tesla posted the weakest year-over-year performance in the first quarter of 2026.
Rivian sold 10,365 vehicles domestically between January and March, a 21.2% increase from 8,553 units a year earlier.
The gain was driven largely by commercial delivery vans, which more than doubled to 3,213 units after Rivian opened EDV orders to fleet customers beyond Amazon.
Consumer models — the R1S and R1T — declined on a year-over-year basis, though the R1S still accounted for 5,494 of the quarter’s registrations.
Rivian has since begun volume production of its more affordable R2 SUV, with customer deliveries underway.
Lucid Motors sold 2,551 vehicles in the US during the first quarter, up 3.5% from the 2,464 units registered a year earlier.
The year-over-year gain came despite a 29-day stop-sale on the Gravity SUV related to a seat belt weld recall that affected deliveries in the period.
Air sedan sales fell 62.7% year over year to 920 units, while Gravity registrations reached 1,631 — the model had not yet launched in the year-ago period. Sequentially, however, Lucid‘s US sales plunged 41.1% from the 4,330 vehicles sold in the fourth quarter of 2025.
Both Rivian and Lucid saw their absolute sales volumes drop sharply from the pre-credit-expiry peak in the third quarter of 2025.
Rivian fell from 13,201 to 10,365, and Lucid from 2,793 to 2,551 — declines of 21.5% and 8.7%, respectively — however those drops were far smaller than Tesla‘s 34.6% slide over the same period.
Ford and GM Bore Steeper Losses
Legacy automakers with EV lineups absorbed even larger blows.
Ford‘s US EV sales collapsed from 30,612 in the third quarter of 2025 to 14,513 in the fourth quarter and just 6,860 in the first quarter of 2026 — a 69.6% year-over-year decline.
The Mustang Mach-E fell 60.4% to 4,600 units, and the F-150 Lightning dropped 71.3% to 2,060.
Ford has been restructuring its EV operations, merging its dedicated electric unit into the broader organization after posting $4.8 billion in EV-related losses in 2025.
General Motors‘ three EV-selling brands — Chevrolet, Cadillac, and GMC — combined for 25,851 US sales in the first quarter of 2026, down 61.1% from the 66,501 units sold in the third quarter of 2025.
Chevrolet, GM’s highest-volume electric brand, registered 13,359 vehicles in the quarter, a 30.4% year-over-year decline.
Tesla Anticipated Sales Decline
The claim that competitors were disproportionately helped by the credit, while Tesla thrived without it, sits alongside the company’s own actions in the months before the incentive ended.
In the third quarter of 2025, Tesla offered record US incentives to drive sales ahead of the September 30 deadline.
Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja acknowledged during the second-quarter 2025 earnings call that the company had “rolled out all our planned incentives already” in anticipation of the credit’s expiration.
After the credit ended, Tesla introduced 0% APR financing on the Model Y and 0.99% on the Model 3 in February 2026, as monthly domestic volumes continued to fall.
Cantor Fitzgerald analyst Andres Sheppard noted in January that the credit’s expiration weighed directly on Tesla’s fourth-quarter results, with both quarterly and full-year 2025 revenue declining from the prior year.
Tesla‘s full-year 2025 US sales stood at 589,160 units, according to Cox Automotive — a 7.0% decline from 633,762 in 2024.
