Tesla Takeover: How the Protests Against Elon Musk Signal a National Turning Point
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is taking a chainsaw to the US government and, at first glance, no one is standing in his way. Musk and his rogue’s gallery of minions are moving fast, dead set on breaking the things that hundreds of millions of people in this country rely on for clean air, water, and food. For healthcare, retirement benefits, and much more. They hit the ground on Day One, doing their very best to remove any checks on their power.
You’d be forgiven for feeling powerless, but you’d be wrong. Believing that you can do something, that together we all can, is the flotation device that can keep you from sinking into the politics of despair, of shock and paralysis. I’m writing this to put some air in your vest and let you know you have the opportunity to fight back. Getting out into the street, protesting, and making your voice heard matters. An activated citizenry is a primary driver of getting shit done. In nearly every case, it’s the reason we have anything to protect from Elon Musk and his wrecking crew in the first place.
On Monday, Feb. 10, the fearless and brilliant sociologist Joan Donovan made a simple post on Bluesky: “Come out and participate in an international picket #TeslaTakeover locally. Stand up and be counted!” I’d met Donovan when I was touring for my documentary about the role of YouTube in the rise of the far-right, and I like the idea of Tesla store protests, so I sent her a direct message asking if I could do some organizing to help drive turnout. She said yes, and I immediately cleared time from my day and got busy. First, I reached out to organizers and allies I’ve met in the 15 years that I’ve been trying to raise the alarm about the rising power of Silicon Valley oligarchs. Next, I made a quick database and sign-up form using online tools. Then I posted it all to Bluesky. And that was it. What I assumed would be a relatively small, one day event.
I showed up to the Tesla showroom on Feb. 15, half-an-hour before the scheduled start of the demonstration, and expected to see just a handful of friends. There were already over 80 people there. And thousands of people all over the country had signed on to the Tesla Takedown page I’d made. That first day, there were peaceful demonstrations at 50 Tesla locations in the US. Some were extremely small but even those were effective. A single protester in Manhattan was able to close down a showroom by standing outside with a sign and engaging with customers and passersby. Three people outside a showroom in Minnesota made it on multiple nightly news broadcasts, spreading their message to millions of people across the Midwest.
There have now been protests outside of Tesla locations in over 100 cities, and the movement is picking up speed and going global. Our website has thousands of visitors a day, signing on for protests, creating their own and downloading our resources. Just as many people are showing up in front of Tesla real estate through entirely separate organizations, like Indivisible and a new formation of rank and file federal workers called the Federal Unionists Network. Another massive day of action is planned this weekend. There are reports that Tesla’s shareholders are already souring on the company’s CEO and chairperson. The stock is dipping.
You might be saying: sure, but haven’t we done this all before? Didn’t people come out into the streets by the millions during the first Trump administration, and didn’t we end up right where we are now, anyway? Haven’t we seen a decade of decentralized mass demonstrations organized online give way to the inevitable backlash, all around the world?
I’d answer yes, and that those earlier demonstrations were transformative. The pink hats, BLM, #Resistance, and other mass public formations all contributed instrumentally to removing Trump from office last time. We know it is possible, we can do it again, and we can do it better. Trump and company learned from that experience, but so have we. The fight continues.
This time around, we have advantages that we can build upon. First of all, there is Bluesky. Unlike X and Meta’s platforms, Bluesky is not owned by a reactionary oligarch. It has grown by fits and starts since Musk’s Twitter takeover, and in the past two weeks has demonstrated that it can be an effective tool for organizing real world actions, in the way that Twitter and Facebook were at certain times in the past.
Secondly, Musk’s net worth is — and has long been — massively overvalued. He owns and runs several companies, but his wealth and claim to being “the richest person in the world” is tied up in Tesla, itself a company with a significantly inflated stock price. This is a bubble that has been waiting to pop, and we can be the needle.
Detaching Musk from Tesla would be a meaningful blow against this administration and its prerogatives, because it would be a strike against what they hold most dear: money and power. And while leaving Tesla wouldn’t deliver Musk to the poorhouse, it would go some way to undermining his image, the reputation as a brilliant engineer and businessman that has been cultivated and burnished for over a decade. It is the source of his clout. And it’s another balloon that’s ready to rupture.
For those of you thinking this is an outsized aim for a homegrown people’s protest, I argue that we have already succeeded in our most important objectives, which is (1) to be a vehicle to inform the public at a time when facts are hard to come by from much of our politicians and the corporate media and (2) to provide an opportunity for the people of this country to show that we can fight back.
We need an alternative to watching things unravel from our couches, that inspires hope and shows that we still have the capacity to oppose those who want to tear the fabric of our society apart and extract their own benefit from the wreckage. #TeslaTakedown is a much needed point of real world convergence for those of us already convinced that Musk and Trump urgently need to be stopped, while offering us the opportunity to reach the millions who prefer to steer clear of political debate and tech critique.
This pressure will continue to build and as it does we will learn and adapt. I hope you’ll join us.
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