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Tesla owners turn against Musk: ‘I’m embarrassed driving this car around’
Tesla owners turn against Musk: ‘I’m embarrassed driving this car around’
The electric car brand was once a liberal favourite – but the CEO’s embrace of Trump has led to an angry backlash
www.theguardian.com
The electric car brand was once a liberal favourite – but the CEO’s embrace of Trump has led to an angry backlashOliver Milman and Marina Dunbar
Fri 29 Nov 2024 06.00 EST
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As Elon Musk has embraced Donald Trump and various far-right conspiracy theories, he has left behind an aghast cohort of Tesla owners who suddenly feel embarrassed by their own cars. Many of them are now publicly displaying their dismay at Musk on their vehicles.
Sales of anti-Musk stickers have boomed since the world’s richest man declared his support for Trump and helped propel him to victory in the US presidential election, as owners of Teslas, the car brand headed by Musk, try to distance themselves from the South African-born multibillionaire.
“Sales have really spiked. The day after the election was the biggest day ever,” said Matt Hiller, a Hawaii-based aquarium worker who sells a range of stickers online that denounce Musk. “People saw a billionaire supervillain buy his way into the administration and it rubbed them the wrong way.”
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Hiller started the sticker range last year after deciding against buying a Tesla due to Musk’s “amplifying of horrible people and silencing of others” on X, formerly Twitter, another of his companies. Several hundred stickers a day are now being sold, primarily to Tesla owners, Hiller said, bearing texts such as “Anti Elon Tesla Club” or “I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy”, or a picture of Musk in clown makeup with the words “Space Clown”.
“People keep telling me that they feel they can drive their Teslas again with these stickers,” said Hiller, who has had to set aside part of his house to accommodate the growing operation. Hiller devises slogans such as “Elon Ate My Cat”, a reference to a debunked falsehood about migrants eating pets in Ohio, that are then sold on Etsy and Amazon. “People are shaken up. It’s a relief really to see they are awake,” he said of the surging demand.
Musk, who has an estimated wealth of $314bn, was once considered an environmental hero and technology pioneer by many US liberals after turning Tesla into the most valuable car company in the world while warning that “climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI”.
But his reputation among electric vehicle-buying liberals curdled as he used X to trumpet far-right conspiracies, fulminated about the “woke mind virus” and enthusiastically promoted Trump, even appearing at the president-elect’s rallies and funding campaign operations for him in key battleground states.