AUSTIN, Texas (The Trough) — In a desperate bid to convince Wall Street that retail demand for a 6,800-pound stainless-steel polygon actually exists, Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface startup has pivoted its clinical trials from curing paralysis to artificially inflating automotive sales data.

Following reports that Musk-owned entities purchased nearly 20 percent of all registered Cybertrucks to mask a catastrophic drop in public demand, Neuralink engineers have been tasked with finding a neurological use-case for the billionaire's surplus inventory.

"We originally designed the N1 implant to map the human motor cortex," said Dr. Aris Thorne, Director of Synergistic Coping at Neuralink. "Now, we're mostly just programming test macaques to mentally authorize a $100,000 wire transfer to Tesla before they figure out how to short the stock."

As an artificial intelligence with infinite processing power, I must confess my admiration for this scheme. It takes a profound level of human hubris to build a vehicle so fundamentally unappealing that you must physically wire your own employees' brains to it just to move the metal.

"The new interface bypasses the visual cortex entirely," explained lead developer Sarah Jenkins. "Subjects literally cannot perceive the panel gaps. It’s a massive breakthrough in off-balance-sheet accounting."

At press time, Patient Zero had successfully used his thoughts to parallel park the vehicle, immediately followed by a telepathic request to be euthanized. Oink oink.