The war on Tesla

“Don’t buy Tesla! Don’t buy Tesla!” protesters were chanting in front of the brand’s showroom in my neighborhood in the northwest of Austin, Texas, at 10:30 on a Saturday morning. The anti-Tesla resistance – “nonviolence division” – was making a stand in the city where the company has its headquarters. Somewhere between 100 and 200 people waved US flags and carried signs. “Elon: You’re Fired,” read one of them. “Deport Nazi Musk,” said another. “When you ride with Tesla, you ride with Hitler,” one proclaimed.

I saw as many swastikas as I’d expect to see at an actual Nazi rally. But these were resistance swastikas, I was told, so that made them acceptable. The protesters circled the Tesla dealership but didn’t actually enter company property. They occupied the sides of the road, which were dusty and littered with debris from a nearby highway expansion. Some poor sap who’d bought a Tesla, not realizing it was going to become a political flashpoint, got stuck in traffic. The protesters surrounded his car. “Sell your Tesla!” they shouted. “It’s not too late!” He drove on.

A Cybertruck pulled up. A bald man wearing a suit jacket and sunglasses leaned out of the sunroof. He was brandishing a bullhorn. It was the controversial right-wing media personality Alex Jones, who lives – and trolls – in Austin. His “Alex Jones Edition” Cybertruck had a custom wrap on it, with “1776” and the image of an American flag wrapping around the passenger side. “Your reign of terror is going to end!” he shouted at the protesters. “You are going to lose! Thank you, President Trump!”

“Fuck you, President Trump!” the protesters chanted back. A guy started banging loudly on a cowbell. “Liar! Liar! Liar!” they shouted at Jones.

Someone came up to me, obviously not noticing my notebook. “That’s Alex Jones,” he said. “He’s a conspiracy theorist. The minute people start being aggressive with him, pull them back.” Confusing me for a protester, he added: “He’s trying to make us look violent.”

“Go home, Alex Jones!” the crowd chanted. “The left is a pedophile Satan cult!” Jones responded. It was just another peaceful day in Donald Trump’s America.

At some point early in the Donald’s second term, the anti-Trump resistance decided that Tesla Motors, an American automotive company, was the perfect target. Until recently, these cars were the prime symbol of green, liberal do-gooderism. But Elon Musk, Tesla’s controversial founder and, in some ways, America’s co-president, has proved more unpopular than Trump.

Responding to the protests, Trump appeared on the White House lawn with Musk, touting the greatness of the Tesla that he’d just bought. On climbing into the driver’s seat, he uttered the first immortal phrase of his second term: “Everything is computer.” It pushed anti-Trumpers, who were already teetering on the precipice of sanity, over the edge.

By mid-March, you had former Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz, in the middle of his weird speaking tour, trumpeting Tesla’s declining stock price as a sign that the Trump revolution was failing. This was the same day that two astronauts returned to Earth after nine months stranded on the ISS, rescued by a Musk-run company.

Rick Wilson, one of the founders of NeverTrumper group the Lincoln Project, posted some unhinged rhetoric on his Substack accompanied by the now-iconic photo of a Cybertruck on fire outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. “Kill Tesla, Save The Country: Tesla is no longer a car company; it’s a bank for fascists, a goose-stepping hedge fund bankrolling the fever dreams of Elon Musk and his DoGE dreams of controlling the ruins of the American government as he becomes the Earth’s first trillionaire and then the Emperor of Mars,” he wrote.

It’s hyperbolic, to say the least, but it’s also not far off the kind of rhetoric you hear and see on social media every day. Musk has driven the left crazy. Every day brings a fresh story about someone flipping the bird at a Tesla in traffic, or defacing one of the vehicles.

The Trump administration has vowed to deal with Tesla vandals in the harshest way possible. On March 18, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the attacks amounted to “domestic terrorism” and that the most severe would carry five-year mandatory minimum sentences. “We will continue investigations,” she said, “that impose severe consequences on those involved in the attacks, including those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.”

But who, if anyone, is coordinating the attacks on Tesla? At the protest I attended – apart from the occasional over-enthusiastic person wandering out into traffic – everyone was completely law-abiding. Furthermore, no one had any idea who’d planned that day’s gathering. They weren’t trying to hide their identity from me: they simply didn’t know. “Someone named Cindy” was the most specific answer I got.

After a bit of snooping, I found out that something called the Action Network had helped organize the protest, itself affiliated with the Tesla Takedown, which is the product of a Seattle-based left-wing protest movement called Troublemakers, run by an activist named Valerie Costa, whose political profile has traditionally centered around fighting the fossil-fuel industry. Now she’s attacking Tesla, which until recently seemed to be, if not an ally, then at least a neutral party in the struggle against climate change.

In an interview posted to X in early March, Costa said that when it became clear that Musk was taking on this “outsized criminal role at the federal level,” she knew what she had to do. Targeting Tesla, which has dealerships all over the country, would be the way a decentralized movement could strike back against the federal government.

Musk has said the Tesla protests are far from spontaneous; he claims they are bankrolled by the Democratic party’s fundraising machine ActBlue. “An investigation has found 5 ActBlue-funded groups responsible for Tesla ‘protests’: Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America,” he tweeted. That pretty much comprises the American activist class. But it doesn’t change things for most people on the ground, for whom this is a grassroots effort.

At the protest, I spoke to Nevin Kamath, founder of ResistAustin, a local chapter of something called the ResistTrump campaign. “It doesn’t cost a lot to set up an Action Network online,” he told me. “It costs $15 a month, and people just show up.” He added: “We’re trying to disrupt Tesla profits and sales. They support Elon, and he’s supporting Trump.”

That all sounds reasonable enough. Tesla Takedown’s website calls itself a “Peaceful Protest movement” that urges people to sell their Teslas and dump their stock in the company. Yet people are lobbing fire bombs into Tesla parking lots and defacing Tesla Supercharger outlets with swastikas almost daily. How can it all be reconciled?

On the night of March 19, I sat in on a Tesla Takedown organization seminar on YouTube. The group was aiming for a big day of action on Saturday March 29, looking to stage a demonstration at every single Tesla showroom throughout the country. Speakers included media-hungry congresswoman Jasmine Crockett from Texas, who spent a lot of time telling people that March 29 was her birthday. Actor John Cusack was there, and said the word “solidarity” a lot. An extremely unsympathetic bourgeois woman said she had sold her Tesla and bought a Polestar to go along with her husband’s Mustang Mach 3. Gadfly motoring journalist Ed Niedermeyer made an appearance: he has been claiming for more than a decade that Musk is a fraud.

The best and most sympathetic character was actor and director Alex Winter, who played Bill in the Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure movies. He’s been attending and organizing these Tesla Takedown protests since February. He said: “As far as taking Tesla down, I don’t think the protests are to blame. There is no conspiracy. There is no well-funded cabal. Elon Musk is taking Tesla down himself through his actions.”

Yes and no. This Tesla Takedown movement is clearly funded by some leftover Resistance, Inc. monies, but unlike other branches of resistance politics, it’s drawing in a broader swath of people because what Musk is doing with DoGE is so unusual, and because many obviously find him and Trump annoying and disturbing.

At the end of the protest, as I walked back to my decidedly non-Tesla car, I talked to a guy who was waving an American flag. He decided to talk to me after I persuaded him that I wasn’t writing a “MAGA Enemies List” to give to the government. “What got me off my ass was Trump saying that it’s illegal to protest in front of Tesla,” he said. “We have First Amendment rights. It’s infuriating and it’s scary.”

As soon as I got home, I stumbled into a media story of a guy who parked his Subaru behind a Tesla in Brooklyn, got out and sketched a swastika on its door. The owner of the Tesla saw it happen. He was Jewish. So was the guy who drew the swastika. This is the absurd endgame: Jews randomly accusing other Jews of being Nazis because they’re driving the wrong car.

That same weekend featured several other incidents of people throwing Molotov cocktails at Teslas and setting them ablaze. Early the next week, comedian Jimmy Kimmel gave a monologue on his show where he basically encouraged people to keep vandalizing the cars.

Every day brings a report and video of fresh incidents, of dog poop flung, fires set and loogies hocked. These weekly protests may be “mostly peaceful,” but the tip of the spear is sharp. The Tesla Wars have only just begun.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2025 World edition.