Once upon a time, Tesla owners could feel assured that they came off as forward-thinking consumers looking to reduce their carbon footprint. The sleek, high-tech electric vehicles were even something of a liberal status symbol.
But no longer. The company’s CEO, billionaire oligarch Elon Musk, who had formerly cultivated the image of an altruistic innovator, is now the face of chaotic disruption in Washington and the most influential ally of President Trump. As a result, Tesla owners who disapprove of the MAGA regime are trading in. A redditor recently explained their decision to get rid of a Model 3: “Last week it hit me: The resale market and eventual trade-in value for this car could fall off a cliff at any time,” they wrote on r/RealTesla. “There’s no telling what lunatic antics Musk could further debase himself with. Our car could become completely unsellable as customers reject the brand at all levels.” Dealers they visited in Southern California reported that their lots were being flooded with unwanted Teslas, this owner added.
Just six weeks into Trump’s second term, with Musk attached to his hip, it is suddenly clear that Tesla could be in big trouble. Eco-conscious customers, critical to its bottom line, are boycotting the brand. Sales have plummeted across the board. Tesla’s latest product, the stainless steel-paneled Cybertruck, was a maligned flop, and Musk has yet to make good on fevered visions of breakthroughs in artificial intelligence tech for autonomous vehicles. Anti-Tesla sentiment is at an all-time high, whether expressed through rude bumper stickers and peaceful protest or vandalism and arson, in part because Musk has continually stoked tension with his far-right politics. He is amplifying white nationalists on X, his social platform, and, in an astounding display at an inauguration event in January, gave a raised-arm salute recognized by neo-Nazis as an unambiguous “Sieg Heil” gesture. (He has, of course, laughed off any criticism.)
The head of Tesla, who according to a poll last month is disliked by more than half of Americans, is also courting the rage of millions as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) by threatening programs including Social Security and Medicare. In seeking a means to retaliate against the wealthiest man alive, their attention has been drawn to Tesla, in which Musk holds an approximately 13-percent stake that accounts for a substantial share of his fortune. His total net worth is down $121 billion from its peak in December, when the company had a market capitalization well in excess of $1 trillion — the gains of a post-election rally wiped out entirely, with the stock price tumbling 38 percent just since Trump’s inauguration. This downturn comes as warning signs of an imminent recession continue to multiply.
How did the company end up in this vulnerable position, and is it at a tipping point? Here’s a breakdown of the blowback that Musk and Tesla are facing on multiple fronts.
Long before Trump stormed back into office and Musk seized power alongside him, Tesla was trending in the wrong direction. The automaker has steadily lost electric vehicle market share to its competitors, while its largest rival in China is outpacing it with advances in driver-assistance software, which Musk has staked out as a cornerstone of his business. Yet Tesla has continually failed to realize the executive’s overblown promises of fully autonomous self-driving cars, and some analysts are deeply skeptical about his attempts to grow Tesla as an AI company that also makes humanoid robots.
Meanwhile, its core automotive business has struggled: Sales dropped by 1.1 percent in 2024, marking the first decline since 2011, while shipments from China have lagged, indicating a dip in demand. Indeed, Tesla’s inventory has piled up so high that you can see lots crammed full of their unsold cars from space. This is despite ever more customer incentives including discounted leases, free charging, and zero percent financing. This week, posts from the official Tesla North America account on X offering either zero percent APR or $0 due at signing on all Model 3 trims provoked speculation that the company has grown desperate to move product.
During this slowdown, Tesla was pouring resources into the production of Cybertrucks, which were met with open mockery upon first deliveries in 2023 for their unorthodox construction and pronounced defects. Since this release coincided with Musk’s ongoing descent into toxic Trumpism — and in part because they are widely regarded as ultra-expensive eyesores — the vehicles have attracted special contempt. There are web forums exclusively devoted to making fun of the trucks and their typically defensive owners.
Beset by countless production quality problems and malfunctions, the Cybertruck was recalled six times last year. Its poor design convinced many of Musk’s hubris and out-of-touch ideas. With sales drying up, Tesla has resorted to offering free charging to customers who buy a version of the EV that starts at $95,000. Short of a miracle, the truck will remain a striking, high-profile disaster at a time when Tesla could ill afford it.
By the time the 2024 election rolled around, long-term owners of conventional Tesla models were seeking to distance themselves from Musk, who had backed the Trump campaign with donations adding up to a quarter of a billion dollars. Embarrassed drivers bought bumper stickers that signaled their opposition with slogans like “Shut Up Elon,” “Anti Elon Tesla Club,” and, perhaps the most popular, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” Following Trump’s victory in November, these stickers rocketed to bestseller status on Amazon and Etsy.
Election season and its aftermath also saw growing interest in cutting ties with Musk’s companies. As hundreds of thousands of users decamped from the Musk-owned X for other social apps, Tesla owners explored options for ditching their cars — though some faced unexpected issues.
On Nov. 27, shortly after Trump’s election, the company quietly canceled the option for leaseholders to transfer a lease, as confirmed by a support webpage. A Los Angeles couple who requested anonymity tells Rolling Stone that they received no notification of this update as it took effect and only discovered their predicament when they tried to transfer the leases on their two cars due to a shared disgust with Musk’s politics. The pair find the post-election timing of the policy change “suspicious.”
“When we looked at early termination, we found out Tesla would charge about [$30,000] to get out of our Tesla X and about [$5,000] to get out of our Tesla 3,” the couple say. “We don’t want to continue the punitive experience by paying out such a substantial sum, so we are stuck.” In their view, “Elon consciously trapped his Democratic customers into the car on November 27th.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment as to why it apparently did not notify leaseholders that the transfer option was coming to an end.
Dan O’Dowd, a software entrepreneur, founder of the tech safety group the Dawn Project, and a fierce critic of Tesla’s so-called “Full Self-Driving” software, says this is an existential moment for Musk’s valuable corporation. “Musk’s involvement in politics could be the downfall of Tesla,” he tells Rolling Stone. “Most companies work hard to maintain relationships on both sides of the aisle. Musk has taken a partisan position against his customer base, who are overwhelmingly Democratic voters.”
As Trump kicked off a second term, Musk’s DOGE moved to quickly hollow out federal agencies and fire thousands of government employees in a reckless purge of talent and institutional knowledge. The frenetic cuts, and Musk’s hogging of the spotlight in the new administration, came as a shock to both Beltway careerists and Wall Street investors, who now appear worried that his prominent, divisive White House role may cost his companies.
It’s not just the blue-state coastal elites, either. The loss of jobs and funding have impacted deep-red districts that went for Trump, whose constituents have delivered such blistering feedback at town halls that GOP leaders have advised Republicans in Congress to quit appearing at such events. While Tesla itself hasn’t come up in clips from these contentious Q&As, people demanding answers from their representatives have specifically targeted Musk in their comments.
Needless to say, Musk simultaneously alienating virtually all Democrats and a sizable contingent of Republicans is not a great blueprint for Tesla’s success over the next few years.
For all the reasons outlined so far, Teslas have come to be targets for petty vandalism — Cybertrucks in particular. One in Brooklyn was egged and smeared with dog feces, while a more polite New York prankster left a note under a Cybertruck windshield wiper that consisted of the single word “DORK.” In online forums, Cybertruck owners commiserate about the ongoing ridicule and people throwing food at the truck. Plus, there’s always the threat of penis graffiti tags. Videos of crowds booing Cybertrucks and pelting them with beads at a Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans also went viral this week. A few owners have actually argued that these displays of hostility should be considered hate crimes.
The trouble is that Musk’s own record of facilitating and flirting with hate speech, often in a trollish manner, invites belligerent response. When accused of throwing up a Nazi salute on inauguration day, he posted a series of punning one-liners about notorious Nazis. In a subsequent interview with Joe Rogan, he issued weak denials of Nazi sympathies, arguing that you can’t be a Nazi unless you are “committing genocide” or “invading Poland,” and that “mannerisms” were not what made the ideology bad. He rehired a young DOGE staffer who resigned when the media reported that he had shared white supremacist content online. Musk also dabbles in the racist “Great Replacement” theory, falsely accuses undocumented migrants of mass voter fraud, engages with antisemitic influencers on X, and backed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, which has connections to neo-Nazis, in the Germany’s latest election.
In a virtual appearance at an AfD event, Musk told the audience that there’s “too much of a focus on past guilt” in Germany, adding: “Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents — let alone their great-grandparents.” The remark seemed to downplay the atrocities of the Holocaust.
The Musk-Nazi-Tesla association is starting to stick. Cybertrucks have earned the epithet “wank panzer,” an allusion to the Third Reich. Not long ago, a Cybertruck driver found that someone had plastered a bumper sticker on the vehicle that showed Musk superimposed on a swastika, making his straight-armed salute. The caption: “I SUCK NAZI COCK.” A U.K. group created an advertisement that also used this image of Musk, calling Tesla “The Swasticar” and noting that it “goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds.” Throughout February and the beginning of March, the “swasticar” designation continued to catch on. Tesla, which dissolved its public relations team in 2020 and only deigned to expand its advertising in 2024 after years of Musk acting as a one-man marketing department, has been unable or unwilling to push back against these commentaries. The company did not immediately return a request for comment about it.
Vandalism like swastikas and the word “Nazi” appearing on Tesla charging stations is one thing, but in Boston this week, a set of chargers were torched in an apparent arson. In Colorado, a woman is facing federal prosecution for allegedly throwing Molotov cocktails at Teslas parked at a dealership, as is a man who allegedly targeted a Salem, Oregon, dealership. Police are presently investigating damage from gunshots at a Tesla center in the Portland metro area. Another suspected arson near the city of Toulouse in France destroyed a Tesla showroom and a dozen cars, inflicting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage.
It seems inevitable that Musk’s incendiary statements and behavior would produce heated rhetoric around him and, eventually, the destruction of property linked to his wealth. In this climate, it’s no wonder that formerly happy Tesla drivers are nervous about a tacit endorsement of the brand. One Tesla owner in Portland recently posted on Reddit that they were considering selling because they had been called a Nazi by a pedestrian. Why wait for the abuse to get worse?
There is, however, a burgeoning non-violent movement to hold Musk accountable for his actions in government by materially weakening his company.
In February, inspired by a social media post from sociologist Joan Donovan about demonstrating at a Tesla dealership, actor and filmmaker Alex Winter contacted organizers to create what would become the protest movement Tesla Takedown. Its website exhorts the public to sell their Teslas, dump their stock, and show up at Tesla lots to “stop Musk now.” It includes materials laying out what Musk has done with DOGE, information on local picketing actions, and a list of index funds that hold Tesla shares so that visitors know how to fully divest.
In an op-ed for Rolling Stone after an initial wave of demonstrations, Winter wrote that such actions “hit the billionaire in the only place he can feel it.”
Winter, whose documentary work has covered the rise of tech oligarchs, tells Rolling Stone that Musk has been a focus of his concern for decades. He figured Tesla Takedown would be a single-day event with minimal turnout, but on Feb. 15, thousands came out in various cities to denounce Musk and DOGE at Tesla showrooms. “We’ve been growing exponentially ever since,” he says. “This past weekend, there were well over 100 protests on our site, with tens of thousands showing up around the country and in the U.K., Iceland, Spain, and Portugal.” There were 129 events scheduled from Wednesday through Sunday of this week.
“I’m bullish about our success and impact,” Winter says. “News spreads fast, and even the events attended by only one person, as we saw in freezing cold Minnesota our first weekend, are being covered by local, national, and global news, and people are being heard by millions.”
Tesla Takedown, Winter explains, has three goals: “First, to toxify the Tesla brand, and drive down the value of the cars and stock, to force a shareholder vote of no-confidence in Musk, and to remove him from the company.” Secondly, to “provide a simple and effective means of protest for the millions of angry citizens who don’t accept Musk’s illegal and destructive intrusion into the U.S. government.” Lastly, the movement is working to “disseminate information on Musk and DOGE’s criminal activities and help educate and inform the public.” Winter believes they can succeed if they can generate enough attention. “And as long as Musk is continuing his rampage, we will be here,” he vows.
As a whole, the market picture for Tesla doesn’t bear much resemblance to Musk’s predictions just nine days into Trump’s second term, on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call, when he said that 2025 would lay the “groundwork” for an “epic” 2026 and a “ridiculously good” 2027 and 2028, with Tesla manufacturing fully autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. “We see a path to Tesla being the largest company in the world and more valuable than the next top five companies combined,” he said.
It’s fair to say that quite a few people are now working together against those goals, with Tesla facing harsh economic headwinds and Musk seemingly distracted with full-time duties in D.C. that have done nothing to endear him to the general populace. Proximity to Trump, while it has certain perks, tends to screw everyone in the end.
From Rolling Stone US
