On a recent Saturday afternoon, around 50 sign-wielding protesters stood outside the Tesla showroom in Manhattan’s Meatpacking neighborhood, screaming insults at passing Tesla vehicles.
“Don’t buy a Swatsticar!”
The excitement peaked when an unsuspecting Cybertruck suddenly pulled around the corner. As a woman in the passenger seat stared wide-eyed out the window, the protestors began to chant: “Micro penis! Micro penis!”
The protest was one of dozens outside Tesla locations across the country that day, spurred by Musk’s attempts to dismantle large parts of the federal government. As part of an effort dubbed #TeslaTakedown or #TeslaTakeover by organizers, groups of protesters have largely planned their actions on Bluesky, a competitor to Musk’s X, and are now entering their third week of activity.
“Don’t buy a Swatsticar!”
It started with a smattering of demonstrations outside Tesla showrooms in places like Maine, Massachusetts, New York, California, and Colorado. But as Musk continues to blaze a path of destruction, the number of protests has exploded. There are currently 65 events listed on TeslaTakedown.com, extending through the end of March. There’s even a growing number of overseas events.
The movement is largely grassroots, lacking any clear leader or organizational structure. Joan Donovan, noted disinformation researcher, is credited with starting the hashtag, and since then, a few established groups like Indivisible and Rise and Resist have hopped aboard to amplify it. But the protests are mostly organized locally.
With Democrats seen as largely paralyzed and feckless in the face of Musk’s takeover, the protests have become the only real outlet to fight back. Protesters say they intend to keep showing up, no matter how long it takes.
In Manhattan, Laurie Aron looked on in a cheetah-patterned fur coat, holding an orange sign that said “Don’t drive fascist.” She said she hopes the protests grow to the point where they eventually hit Musk where it hurts: his pocketbook.
“I would like to see him weakened in any way possible,” she said. “There’s a lot of talk about his sale price, that sales of Tesla are tanking, that eventually his stock price is going to disappear, is going to lower, that he’s not going to be the brilliant billionaire. And I would like to see him look a lot weaker and dumber.”
If it seems as if Musk is strutting around like he’s untouchable, it’s for a good reason. He’s an unofficial “special adviser” to President Donald Trump, operating outside the cabinet, and is therefore not required to disclose corporate holdings or report financial conflicts of interest. Congress has little ability to scrutinize him — Democrats can formally send strongly worded letters, while most Republicans are actively cheering him on. And while Musk occasionally answers a few questions from the press, he ignored an invitation to appear before the first Republican-led Congressional subcommittee on the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Musk’s status as the richest man in the world is largely thanks to Tesla’s stock price. He owns 13 percent of the company, making him the single largest shareholder. As of today, the company is worth $1.08 trillion, meaning Musk’s stake is worth about $140 billion. And Tesla’s board of directors is composed of close friends and relatives, raising concerns about its independence from the controversial CEO. Several current and former Tesla board members have additionally invested millions of dollars in Musk’s other companies, like xAI and SpaceX.
If it seems as if Musk is strutting around like he’s untouchable, it’s for a good reason.
So how do you oppose someone so powerful, so untouchable, so unaccountable?
Donovan, a sociologist and disinformation researcher who was previously ousted from her position at Harvard for exposing Meta’s financial ties to the university, saw an opportunity after reading about a small gathering at a Tesla Supercharger station in Maine. Not one to take a billionaire-led coup lying down, Donovan decided she and her friends would protest outside a Tesla showroom in Boston — and would go online and encourage others to do the same.
“It really comes down to understanding how rich people’s money works,” Donovan told me. “Musk is not Scrooge McDuck with his own Fort Knox where he can swim around in the gold doubloon. He’s over leveraged on loans from his Tesla stock.”
The aim was multipronged: get people to sell their Tesla stock and vehicles; make other people reconsider investing in Tesla or buying a vehicle; toxify the brand by associating it with Musk and his “Heil Hitler” salute at Trump’s inauguration. They scored a big win when musician Sheryl Crow posted a video of herself selling her Tesla on Instagram.
“There comes a time when you have to decide who you are willing to align with,” Crow wrote in the caption. “So long Tesla.”
“It really comes down to understanding how rich people’s money works.”
Bluesky proved useful in spreading the word. It’s already teeming with Twitter refugees who fled after the social platform was Musk-ified and turned into X. Donovan started using the hashtag #TeslaTakedown to encourage others to protest outside showrooms in their communities. Soon enough, the hashtag was picked up by Alex Winter, a documentary filmmaker and actor famous for his role in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and its sequels. Winter set up a website, TeslaTakedown.com, to serve as a one-stop shop for anyone interested in demonstrating.
“I’d say the obvious Tesla-targeted mission is to create a movement that helps toxify Musk’s relationship to the company and create a vote of no confidence from the shareholders,” Winter said. “And that would impact him greatly because much of his wealth is tied up in his stake in Tesla. And also to shareholders and to board members, it is repellent to have an outwardly fascist autocrat at the head of that company.”
In the aftermath of Trump’s inauguration, the media has largely been focused on the lack of a mass opposition movement analogous to the Women’s March in 2017 during the first Trump administration. But Winter says that an atomized protest movement can be just as effective.
“I think a misnomer around protest is that if you don’t have a million people flooding into the mall in DC, it’s meaningless, which is really not true,” he said. “We’ve had individual picketers shutting entire stores down, luring out local news, creating a stir in their cities. That’s very, very meaningful.”
The protests have occurred during a particularly vulnerable moment in Tesla’s history. Sales are down year over year for the first time in over a decade. And in another first, the company’s market share recently dropped below 50 percent. Tesla’s bestsellers, the Model 3 and Model Y, were both updated in the past year, but the company’s lineup is mostly seen as stale and badly in need of an overhaul. The Cybertruck, the first new model in years, is looking less like a game-changer and more like a flash in the pan.
Of course, the sales drop preceded the protests. It’s unclear what kind of effect, if any, the demonstrations will have on Tesla’s future sales. But Musk’s own approval is underwater, with nearly 50 percent of respondents to a February 13th–18th Washington Post-Ipsos poll saying they disapprove of how Musk was handling his job.
Tesla’s stock price is wildly high. Its inflated value is largely dependent on Musk’s narrative of the company as a global leader in robotics and AI. As noted by labor journalist Hamilton Nolan recently, Tesla’s price-to-earnings ratio is currently 164, meaning that its stock price is 164 times the value of its earnings per share. By comparison, the average PE ratio of the top 500 companies in America right now is 30, which is high by historic standards.
But it’s not clear that hurting Tesla will actually matter much to Musk. He remains in Trump’s good graces, and predictions of an imminent falling out between the two appear to be mostly wish-casting. Even if these protests can seriously affect Tesla, Musk has consolidated so much political power that, after a certain point, it’s not clear whether market forces still apply as strongly.
“We’ve had individual picketers shutting entire stores down, luring out local news, creating a stir in their cities.”
But Tesla’s stock behaves like a meme stock, and meme stocks tend to be susceptible to narrative shifts. Tesla’s narrative is that Musk is a genius who will build humanoid robots and self-driving cars and take us to Mars. But now the narrative is changing, and Musk is seen in a different light: an unaccountable billionaire oligarch, a leader of a coup, a hatchet man for Trump, and a right-wing fascist.
This is what the Tesla Takedown wants to exploit. And while the protesters are demonstrating peacefully outside showrooms, others are taking matters into their own hands. There have been numerous reports of Cybertrucks and other Teslas being defaced with swastikas and Nazi-related graffiti. Someone shot out the windows of a Tesla showroom in Salem, Oregon. The FBI is investigating.
Musk himself has said very little about the protests. He tends to mock or belittle his critics on X but has kept his powder dry in this case. At CPAC last week, after swinging a chainsaw around in dark sunglasses, Musk did appear to make offhand reference to the protests.
“You see, like, these, these sort of fake rallies with hardly any people,” he said, “and the media will, like, frame it, [making a rectangle with his fingers] and like, you know, get all six people in the frame, but it’s like, nobody else is there, like, just, it doesn’t have popular support.”
Truthfully, a lot of the protests have been sparsely attended. On the same day as the Manhattan protest, a dozen people stood outside a Tesla store in Devon, Pennsylvania. A columnist covering the event noted that he should have crossed the Delaware River to Cherry Hill, NJ, where over 300 people were picketing.
Winter says the frequency of the protests will matter more than individual headcount. “The internet is great for creating very robust, decentralized movements,” he said, “which is what this is.”
In the Meatpacking District, John B. from Brooklyn waved a sign with a picture of a shiba inu, the dog from the “DOGE” meme, getting bonked on the head with a bat. John, who declined to share his last name, heard about the protests from Winter on Bluesky and wanted to come out and register his anger about the programs that were being slashed by Musk and his cronies. Real people are going to be hurt by the layoffs and cuts, he said. So Musk should feel the pain, too.
“He is ruining people’s lives with these cutoffs, and it’s cruel,” said John. “And so if we can drive Tesla sales down further, if we can convince five people here today that maybe I don’t actually want a Tesla, I think that’s a victory for us.”
