A Quick History of the Tesla Takedown Movement
Photo by Henry B. (https://www.henrybphotography.com/) for Tesla Takedown
I’m Shua Sanchez. I’ve been organizing protests in Boston with the Tesla Takedown Movement since it kicked off in February 2025. Below is a personal recollection of the movement’s history and development, from Boston to Seattle to Oakland, and everywhere in between.
Elon Musk, Tesla, and Trump
In the 2010s, Elon Musk was the “good billionaire.” He was the guy building electric cars and solar panels, and it seemed like he was doing more than any individual business leader to fight climate change. It’s hard to imagine it now, but Musk had a genuine following among liberals; they bought his cars in the early years of Tesla, despite all kinds of quality issues and broken product promises, because Tesla represented a high-tech, zero carbon emissions future.
Even so, Musk has always been ruthless in his business practices. In 2008, he forced out the original founder and CEO of Tesla and took those titles for himself. Workers at Tesla factories collapsed from exhaustion so often that ambulances were kept on site. But importantly, he had always been a self-described Democrat, openly endorsing every Democratic presidential candidate from Obama to Biden. His support might have been out of self-interest though, as Democrats gave his businesses billions of dollars through contracts, subsidies, and loans. Apparently, his sins as a businessman could be overlooked as long as he was leading the clean energy transition.
But Elon changed during the Covid pandemic. He was furious that the lockdowns halted production at his factories. He fell into rightwing social media echo chambers. His substance abuse issues and his obsessive Twitter posting intensified. He went on to buy Twitter in 2022, ending content moderation and turning it into a hateful rightwing space, and for the first time, he endorsed the GOP in the midterms. In 2024, he was the single largest financial supporter of the GOP, spending at least $290 million to support Trump and other Republican candidates.
The payoff was immediate. The stock price of Tesla nearly doubled in the month after Trump won the 2024 election, owing to the new Trump-Musk friendship. After the inauguration, Musk became the head of the Department of Government Efficiency (the name was chosen to create the acronym DOGE, in reference to a meme, and is yet another example of Elon trying to be internet-funny but ultimately just cringy). DOGE was staffed by a bunch of rightwing amateur coders in their 20s, and the only job requirement seemed to be loyalty to Elon and a willingness to smash anything related to government regulation and wokeness. In just a month, tens of thousands of federal workers had been fired, and billions of dollars of grants were revoked. But while the official mission of DOGE was to cut wasteful spending, the real mission was to cut funding and staff at the 11 federal agencies that had open investigations of Elon Musk and his businesses. Elon’s support of Trump, it seems, was strategically based on keeping himself out of bankruptcy and out of jail.
The Tesla Takedown Protests
To be honest, the three weeks after the inauguration were the most hopeless of my life. It seemed that everyone on the left was exhausted, and all we could do each day was read about the latest firings, budget cuts, and abuses of power.
But out of that hopelessness came two new grassroots movements: 50501 and Tesla Takedown. 50501 has a political focus, both for expressing outrage against Trump and calling on elected politicians to take a stronger stand against fascism. Tesla Takedown also has a political focus, but the tactic is an economic one. The basic goal is to punish Elon Musk for his attacks on the federal government by staging a global boycott of Tesla to directly damage Musk’s net worth.
The protest movement kicked off in early February, with scattered independent protests against Elon Musk at Tesla showrooms and superchargers. Protests in Boston and Seattle got major attention on the social media app Bluesky, and it was clear that there was interest in building a broader movement. (The story was recently covered in great detail in an excellent article by WIRED.) The Seattle organizers used the Action Network website to create a campaign where anyone in the world could host a protest at a Tesla showroom in their city.
Within just a few weeks, the handful of protests turned into dozens and then over a hundred each weekend by mid-March. The movement had a Global Day of Action on March 29, with protests at over 250 locations worldwide, our single largest event ever. Protests continued into the spring and the summer. By our estimates, more than 100,000 people have participated in a Tesla Takedown protest.
The protests brought together all kinds of people to share in their fury at Elon Musk. Protest art flourished, with thousands of homemade signs created. Probably the most-invoked visual of the protest is the infamous Nazi salute that Musk made twice at Trump’s inauguration; this image was used in everything from signs to banners to 15 foot tall Elon Musk inflatable tube men. While it’s right to call Trump a fascist, that salute really makes it fair to call Musk a Nazi, and it justifies my favorite chant of the movement: “We don’t want your Nazi cars, take a one-way trip to Mars.” Despite the heaviness of the purpose, there’s often a sense of joy at the protests. Seeing dozens to hundreds of people coming together to fight fascism revives our collective hope for a better future.
It's clear that the protests have had a real impact, and have put Musk on the defensive. The protests helped raise awareness of Musk’s actions in D.C., and Tesla sales started dropping considerably as liberals abandoned Musk. In fact, Tesla’s two worst sales quarters ever were in 2025. The protests also drove Tesla stock value down from its historic high, and in March and April the stock price was often lower than it was before the election. In desperation, Musk got Trump to host a Tesla car commercial on the White House lawn, but this marketing attempt backfired and only turned off more people from buying Teslas (except the MAGA true believers, who mostly aren’t interested in owning an electric car). In May, we celebrated our success when Musk announced that he was leaving D.C. to return his focus to his struggling businesses. And in June, enraged over GOP cuts to the EV subsidies that had lined his pockets, Musk publicly broke up with Trump through a series of spiteful, bitter, and typically-juvenile Twitter posts. He’s now friendless on the left and on the right, his companies are losing money, his rockets are exploding, and his public image is permanently tarnished. While Musk did a lot of this damage to himself, the Tesla Takedown movement put the pressure on him that eventually caused him to crack.
The fight continues today. While the protests have grown smaller since Musk left D.C., they still take place every weekend at showrooms all over the country. Many activists have joined a new push to get unions, as well as municipal and state governments, to divest pension funds from Tesla. Tesla’s embarrassing launch of a robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, has been met with local resistance led by Tesla Takedown activists. And Tesla is facing legal battles on multiple fronts, most importantly in California, where the state DMV is attempting to suspend Tesla’s license to sell vehicles after years of misleading advertising about the safety and capabilities of their (supposedly) self-driving systems, Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. I was in Oakland the week of the hearing to stage a protest with other Tesla Takedown activists; we made 58 tombstones with the dates of every fatal Tesla self-driving fatality to call attention to Tesla’s unsafe tech.
While the specific strategies of the movement are continuously evolving, Tesla Takedown is still going strong. We will keep fighting to hold Elon Musk accountable for his actions.
Shua Sanchez can be reached via Bluesky (@shuasanchez.bsky.social).
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