Cars

On a sunny April afternoon in Seattle, around 40 activists gathered at the Pine Box, a beer and pizza bar in the sometimes scruffy Capitol Hill neighborhood. The group had reserved a side room attached to the outside patio; before remarks began, attendees flowed in and out, enjoying the warm day. Someone set up a sound system. Then the activists settled in, straining their ears as the streamed call crackled through less-than-perfect speakers.

In more than a decade of climate organizing, it was the first time Emily Johnston, one of the group’s leaders, had attended a happy hour to listen to a company’s quarterly earnings call. Also the first time a local TV station showed up to cover such a happy hour. “This whole campaign has been just a magnet for attention,” she says.

The group, officially called the Troublemakers, was rewarded right away. TeslaCEO Elon Musk started the investors’ call for the first quarter of 2025 with a sideways acknowledgement of exactly the work the group had been doing for the past two months. He called out the nationwide backlash to the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, an effort to cut government spending staffed by young tech enthusiasts and Musk company alumni, named—with typical Muskian Internet-brained flourish—for an early 2010s meme.

“Now, the protests you’ll see out there, they’re very organized, they’re paid for,” Musk told listeners. For weeks, thousands of people—including the Troublemakers—had camped outside Tesla showrooms, service centers, and charging stations. Musk suggested that not only were they paid for their time, they were only interested in his work because they had once received “wasteful largesse” from the federal government. Musk had presented the theory and sharpened it on his social media platform X for weeks. Now, he argued, the protesters were off the dole—and furious.

Musk offered no proof of his assertions; to a person, every protester who spoke to WIRED insisted that they are not being paid and are exactly what they appear to be: people who are angry at Elon Musk. They call their movement the “Tesla Takedown.”

Before Musk got on the call to speak to investors, Tesla, which arguably kicked off a now multitrillion-dollar effort to transition global autos to electricity, had presented them with one of the company’s worst quarterly financial reports in years. Net income was down 71 percent year over year; revenue fell more than $2 billion short of Wall Street’s expectations.

Now, in Seattle, just the first few minutes of Musk’s remarks left the partygoers, many veterans of the climate movement, giddy. Someone close to the staticky speakers repeated the best parts to the small crowd: “I think starting probably next month, May, my time allocation to DOGE will drop significantly,” Musk said. Under a spinning disco ball, people whooped and clapped. Someone held up a snapshot of Tesla’s stock performance over the past year, a jagged but falling black line.

“If you ever wanted to know that protest matters, here’s your proof,” Johnston recalled weeks later.

The Tesla Takedown, an effort to hit back at Musk and his wealth where it hurts, seems to have appeared at just the right time. Tesla skeptics have argued for years that the company, which has the highest market capitalization of any automaker, is overvalued. They contend that the company’s CEO has been able to distract from flawed fundamentals—an aging vehicle lineup, a Cybertruck sales flop, the much-delayed introduction of self-driving technology—with bluster and showmanship.

Musk’s interest in politics, which kicked into a new and more expensive gear when he went all in for Donald Trump during the 2024 election, was always going to invite more scrutiny for his business empire. But the grassroots movement, which began as a post on Bluesky, has become a boisterous, ragtag, and visible locus of, sorry to use the word, resistance against Musk and Trump. It’s hard to pin market moves on any one thing, but Tesla’s stock price is down some 33 percent since its end-of-2024 high.

Tesla Takedown points to a uniquely screwed-up moment in American politics. Down is up; up is down. A man who made a fortune sounding the alarm about the evils of the fossil fuel industry joined with it to spend hundreds of millions in support of a right-wing presidential candidate and became embedded in an administration with a slash-and-burn approach to environmental regulation. (This isn’t good for electric cars.) The same guy, once extolled as the real-life Tony Stark—he made a cameo in Iron Man 2!—has become for some a real-life comic book villain, his skulduggery enough to bring together a coalition of climate activists, freaked-out and laid-off federal workers, immigrant rights champions, union groups, PhDs deeply concerned about the future of American science, Ukraine partisans, liberal retirees sick of watching cable news, progressive parents hoping to show their kids how to stick up for their values, LGBTQ+ rights advocates, despondent veterans, and car and tech nerds who have been crying foul on Musk’s fantastical technology claims for years now.

To meet the moment, then, the Takedown uses a unique form of protest logic: Boycott and protest the electric car company not because the movement disagrees with its logic or mission—quite the opposite, even!—but because it might be the only way to materially affect the unelected, un-beholden-to-the-public guy at its head. And then hope the oft-irrational stock market catches on.

So for weeks, across cities like New York; Berkeley and Palo Alto, California; Meridian, Idaho; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Raleigh, North Carolina; South Salt Lake, Utah; and Austin, Texas, the thousands of people who make up the Takedown movement have been stationed outside of Tesla showrooms, making it a little bit uncomfortable to test drive one of Musk’s electric rides, or even just drive past in one.

Change in the air

When Shua Sanchez graduated from college in 2013, there was about a week, he remembers, when he was convinced that the most important thing he could do was work for Tesla. He had a degree in physics; he knew all about climate change and what was at stake. He felt called to causes, had been protesting since George W. Bush invaded Iraq when he was in middle school. Maybe his life’s work would be helping the world’s premier electric carmaker convince drivers that there was a cleaner and more beautiful life after fossil fuel.

In the end, though, Sanchez opted for a doctorate program focusing on the quantum properties of super-conducting and magnetic materials. (“I shoot frozen magnets with lasers all day,” he jokes.) So he felt thankful for his choice a few years later when he read media reports about Tesla’s efforts to tamp down unionizing efforts at its factories. He felt more thankful when, in 2017, Musk signed on to two of Trump’s presidential advisory councils. (The CEO publicly departed them months later, after the administration pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.) Even more thankful in 2022, when Musk acquired Twitter with the near-express purpose of opening it up to extreme right-wing speech. More thankful still by the summer of 2024, after Musk officially endorsed Trump’s presidential bid.

By the time Musk appeared onstage at a rally following Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 and threw out what appeared to be a Nazi salute—Musk has denied that was what it was—Sanchez, now in a postdoctorate fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was ready to do something about it besides not taking a job at Tesla. A few days later, as reports of DOGE’s work began to leak out of Washington, a friend sent him a February 8 Bluesky post from a Boston-based disinformation scholar named Joan Donovan.

“If Musk thinks he can speed run through DC downloading personal data, we can certainly bang some pots and pans on the sidewalks in front of Tesla dealerships,” Donovan posted on the platform, already an online refuge for those looking for an alternative to Musk’s X. “Bring your friends and make a little noise. Organize locally, act globally.” She added a link to a list of Tesla locations, and a GIF of the Swedish Chef playing the drums on some vegetables with wooden spoons. Crucially, she appended the hashtag #TeslaTakeover. Later, the Internet would coalesce around a different rallying cry: #TeslaTakedown.

The post did not go viral. To date, it has only 175 likes. But it did catch the attention of actor and filmmaker Alex Winter. Winter shot to prominence in 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure—he was Bill—and has more recently produced multiple documentaries focusing on online culture, piracy, and the power of social media. He and Donovan had bonded a few years earlier over activism and punk rock, and the actor, who has a larger social media following, asked the scholar if he could create a website to centralize the burgeoning movement. “I do think we’re at a point where people need to stick their necks up out of the foxhole en masse, or we’re simply not going to get through,” he tells WIRED. In the website’s first 12 hours of existence, he says, thousands of people registered to take part in the Takedown.

Donovan’s Bluesky post brought Sanchez to the Boston Back Bay Tesla showroom on Boylston Street the next Saturday, where 30 people had gathered with signs. For Sanchez, the whole thing felt personal. “Elon Musk started a PhD at Stanford in my field. He quit after two days and then went and became a tech bro, but he presents that he’s one of us,” he says. With Musk’s new visibility—and plans to slash government research dollars while promoting right-wing ideology—Sanchez was ready to push back.

Sanchez has been outside the showroom during weekly protests throughout the Boston winter, megaphone in hand, leading chants: “It ain’t fun. It ain’t funny. Elon Musk is stealing your money.” “We don’t want your Nazi cars. Take a one-way trip to Mars.”

“We make it fun, so a lot of people come back,” Sanchez says. Someone slapped Musk’s face on one of the inflatable tube guys you often see outside of car dealerships; he whipped around at several protests. A popular bubble-themed routine—“Tesla is a bubble”—saw protesters toss around a giant, transparent ball as others blew bubbles around it. Then the ball popped, loudly, during a protest—a sign? At some of Boston’s biggest actions, hundreds of people have shown up to demonstrate against Tesla, Musk, and Trump, Sanchez says.

Donovan envisioned the protests as potent visible responses to Musk’s slashing of government programs and jobs. But she also knew that social movements are a critical release valve in times of upheaval. “People need to relieve the pressure that they feel when the government is not doing the right thing,” she tells WIRED. “If you let that pressure build up too much, obviously it can turn very dangerous.”

In some ways, she’s right. In at least four incidents across four states, people have been charged by the federal government with various crimes including defacing, shooting at, throwing Molotov cocktails toward, and setting fire to Tesla showrooms and charging stations. In a move that has worried civil liberties experts, the Trump administration has treated these attacks against the president’s richest backer’s car company as “domestic terrorism,” granting federal authorities greater latitude and resources to track down alleged perpetrators and threatening them with up to 20 years in prison.

In posts on X and in public appearances, Musk and other federal officials have seemed to conflate the actions of a few allegedly violent people with the wider protests against Tesla, implying that both are funded by shadowy “generals.” “Firing bullets into showrooms and burning down cars is unacceptable,” Musk said at an event last month in which he appeared remotely on video, his face looming over the stage. “Those people will go to prison, and the people that funded them and organized them will also go to prison. Don’t worry.” He looked into the camera and pointed his finger at the audience. “We’re coming for you.”

Tesla Takedown participants and leaders have repeatedly said that the movement is nonviolent. “Authoritarian regimes have a long history of equating peaceful protest with violence. The #TeslaTakedown movement has always been and will remain nonviolent,” Dallas volunteer Stephanie Frizzell wrote in an email. What violence has occurred at protests themselves seems limited to on-site spats that mostly target protesters.

Donovan herself skipped some protests after receiving death threats and hearing a rumor that she was on a government list targeting disinformation researchers. On X, prominent right-wing accounts harassed her and other Takedown leaders; she says people have contacted her colleagues to try to get her fired.

Then, on the afternoon of March 6, Boston University ecology professor Nathan Phillips was in his office on campus when he received a panicked message from his wife. She said that two people claiming to represent the FBI visited their home. “I was just stunned,” Phillips says. “We both had a feeling of disbelief, that this must be some kind of hoax or a joke or something like that.”

Phillips had attended a Tesla Takedown event weeks earlier, but he wasn’t sure whether the visit was related to the protests or his previous climate activism. So after sitting shocked in his office for an hour, he called his local FBI field office. Someone picked up and asked for his information, he remembers, and then asked why he was calling. Phillips explained what had happened. “They just abruptly hung up on me,” he says.

Phillips never had additional contact from the FBI, but he knows of at least five other climate activists who were visited by men claiming to be from the agency on March 6.

The FBI tells WIRED that it “cannot confirm or deny the allegations” that two agents visited Phillips’ home. Tesla did not respond to WIRED’s questions about the Tesla Takedown movement or Musk’s allegations of coordinated violence against the company.

After the incident, Phillips began searching online for mentions of his name, and he found posts on X from an account that also tagged Joan Donovan and FBI director Kash Patel.

Phillips says that the FBI visit has had the opposite of a chilling effect. “If anything, it’s further radicalized me,” he says. “People having my back and the expression of support makes me feel very confident that it was the right thing to do to speak out about this.”

Organizing for the first time

Mike had attended a few protests in the past but didn’t know how to organize one. He has a wife, three small kids, a house in the suburbs, and a health issue that can sometimes make it hard to think. So by his own admission, his first attempt in February was a mixed bag. It was the San Francisco Bay Area-based Department of Labor employee’s first day back in the office after the Trump administration, spurred by DOGE, had demanded all workers return full-time. He was horrified by the fast-moving job cuts, program changes, and straight-up animus he had already seen flow from the White House down to his small corner of the federal government.

“Attacks on federal workers are an attack on the Constitution,” Mike says. Maybe, he figured, if he could keep people from buying Teslas, that would hurt Elon Musk’s bottom line, and the CEO would lay off DOGE altogether.

Mike, who WIRED is referring to using a pseudonym because he fears retaliation, saw that a Tesla showroom was just a 20-minute walk from his office, and he hoped to convince some coworkers to convene there, a symbolic stand against DOGE and Musk. So he taped a few flyers on light poles. He didn’t have social media, but he posted on Reddit. “I was really worried,” he says, “about the Hatch Act,” a law that limits the political activities of federal employees.

In the end, three federal workers—the person sitting next to him at the office and a US Department of Veterans Affairs nurse they ran into on the street—posted up outside of the Tesla showroom on Van Ness Avenue in downtown San Francisco holding “Save Federal Workers” signs.

Then Mike discovered the #TeslaTakedown website that Alex Winter had built. (Because of a quirk in the sign-up process, the site was putatively operated for a time by the Seattle Troublemakers.) It turned out a bunch of other people had thought that Tesla showrooms were the right places to air their grievances with Trump, Musk, and DOGE. Mike posted his event there. Now the SF Save Federal Workers protest, which happens every Monday afternoon, draws 20 to 40 people.

Through the weekly convening, Mike has met volunteers from the Federal Unionists Network, who represent public unions; the San Francisco Labor Council, a local affiliate of the national AFL-CIO; and the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. As in any amicable custody arrangement, Mike’s group shares the strip of sidewalk outside of the San Francisco Tesla showroom with a local chapter of the progressive group Indivisible, which holds bigger protests on Saturdays. “I’m trying to build connections, meet other community groups,” Mike says. “My next step is broadening the coalition.”

About half of the people coordinating Takedown protests are like Mike, says Evan Sutton, who is part of the national team: They haven’t organized a protest before. “I’ve been in politics professionally for almost 20 years,” Sutton says. “It is genuinely the most grassroots thing that I’ve seen.”

Well into the spring, Tesla Takedown organizers nationwide had held hundreds of events across the US and even the globe, and the movement has gained a patina of professionalism. Tesla Takedown sends press releases to reporters. The movement has buy-in from Indivisible, a progressive network that dates back to the first Trump administration, with local chapters hosting their own protests. At least one Democratic congressional campaign has promoted a local #TeslaTakedown event.

Beyond the showrooms, Tesla sales are down by half in Europe compared to last year and have taken a hit in California, the US’s biggest EV market. Celebrities including Sheryl Crow and Jason Bateman have publicly ditched their Teslas. A Hawaii-based artist named Matthew Hiller started selling “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy” car decals in 2023; he estimates he has sold 70,000 anti-Musk and anti-Tesla stickers since then. (There was a “Space X-size explosion of sales after his infamous salute,” Hiller says.) In Seattle, the Troublemakers regularly hold “de-badging” events, where small handfuls of sheepish owners come by to have the T emblems drilled off their cars.

In Portland, Oregon, on a recent May Saturday, Ed Niedermeyer was once again sweating through his shark costume as he hopped along the sidewalk in front of the local Tesla showroom. His sign exhibited the DOGE meme, an alert Shiba Inu, with the caption “Heckin’ fascism.” (You’d get it if you spent too much time on the Internet in 2013.) Honks rang out. The shark tends to get a good reaction from drivers going by, he said. About 100 people had shown up to this Takedown protest, in front of a Tesla showroom that sits kitty-corner to a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement office.

Niedermeyer is a car writer and has spent a lot of time thinking about Elon Musk since 2015, when he discovered that Tesla wasn’t actually operating a battery swapping station like it said it did. Since then, he has written a book, Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, and documented many of what he claims to be Musk’s and the automaker’s half-truths on their way to the top.

Niedermeyer acknowledges that Musk and Tesla have proven difficult to touch, even by nationwide protests literally outside their doors.

Despite the Seattle cheers during Tesla’s last quarterly earnings call, the automaker’s stock price gained steam through the spring and rose on the news that its CEO would no longer officially work for the federal government. Musk has said investors should value Tesla not as a carmaker but as an AI and robotics company. At the end of this month, after years of delays, Tesla says it will launch a robotaxi service. According to Wall Street analysts’ research notes, they believe him.

Even a public fight with the president—one that devolved into name-calling on Musk’s and Trump’s respective social platforms—was not enough to pop the Tesla bubble.

“For me, watching Musk and watching our inability to stop him and create consequences for this snowballing hype and power has really reinforced that we need a stronger government to protect people from people like him,” says Niedermeyer.

Still, Tesla Takedown organizers take credit for the cracks in the Musk-Trump alliance—and say the protests will continue. The movement has also incorporated a more cerebral strategy, organizing local efforts to convince cities, states, and municipalities to divest from Musk’s companies. They already had a breakthrough in May, when Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, became the first US public pension fund to say it wouldn’t purchase new Tesla stocks for its managed investment accounts.

The movement’s goals may be lofty, but Niedermeyer argues that despite Tesla’s apparent resilience, Musk is still America’s most vulnerable billionaire. And sure, Musk, the CEO of an electric car company, the guy who made himself the figurehead for his automaker and fired his PR team to make sure it would stick, the one who alienated the electric car company’s customer base through a headlong plunge not only into political spending but the delicate mechanics of government itself—he did a lot of it on his own.

Now Niedermeyer, and everyone involved in Tesla Takedown, and probably everyone in the whole world, really, can only do what they can. So here he is, in a shark costume on the side of the road, maintaining the legally mandated distance from the car showroom behind him.

This story originally appeared on wired.com.