Movement in Opposition to “DOGE” Plans Day of Protests Outside Tesla Showrooms

On March 29, the Tesla Takedown movement will engage in a Global Day of Action at Tesla showrooms around the world. For weeks, protests outside of Tesla dealerships have grown, as participants have lashed out at Elon Musk, the leader of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is currently raiding and dismantling government services. The movement took off after Elon Musk’s apparent Nazi salute at an Inauguration Day event for Trump supporters. Musk has dismissed the “Sieg Heil” accusations, but his estranged daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson has not minced words on the subject, telling Teen Vogue, “Honey, we’re going to call a fig a fig, and we’re going to call a Nazi salute what it was. That shit was definitely a Nazi salute.”

For Tesla Takedown organizer Joel Lava, the gesture was definitely a turning point. “The Sieg Heil was kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back for many people,” Lava told me. “When he did that, I said, ‘I got to do something.’” After seeing Musk’s repeated gesture, Lava and a friend decided to make protest signs and stand outside a Tesla showroom in Burbank, California. Lava and his companion were heartened by the response from passing cars. “We were very happy to get honks,” he said. “Then, the next day, we had four people, and it’s basically been doubling every weekend,” Lava explained. “We recently had 300 people.”

Lara Starr, an organizer in Marin County, California, joined the movement in a similar manner. Since 2016, Starr has been hosting monthly gatherings that began as part of the Solidarity Sundays initiative during Trump’s first term. “We’ve been getting together once a month on Sundays, mostly to write postcards, although sometimes we have canvassed and done a couple of other actions,” Starr told me. “But after this last election, we looked at each other and said, ‘Postcards don’t seem like enough.’” In late February, the group decided it was time to protest. “We said, ‘We should turn out. We should go to Tesla.’” The group staged its first event outside a Tesla showroom on Sunday, February 23, about one month into Trump’s current term.

“Our group is pretty small, so we thought there would be maybe six, eight people who came,” Starr said. However, members of a local chapter of the nonprofit Indivisible heard about the protest Starr’s group was planning and amplified the call to action. “We had 200 people show up, which was amazing,” she said. “After that action was so successful, we were like, ‘All right, same time next week.’ And so we’ve been doing it weekly since then.” In the beginning, Starr says she didn’t understand the national scope of the protests around Tesla. “We heard that there were some things happening at different Tesla locations, but I didn’t know about the Tesla Takedown hashtag. I didn’t know about any of that until after we did our first action.”

Despite Musk’s conspiratorial claims about the protests, the Tesla Takedown activists and organizers I’ve spoken with have described protests that evolved organically in a decentralized manner. While the support of already-organized people, including groups like Indivisible, has been energizing for the movement, participants on the ground say they are motivated by personal outrage and fears about the future under Trump’s oligarchical regime.

Starr shared that many people who have joined the protests have expressed gratitude for the opportunity to participate. “In what now seems like early days, less than a month ago, the overwhelming thing I heard from people was, ‘Thank you for giving us a place to go because we’ve been at home clenching our fists and didn’t really know what to do.’”

Lava echoed Starr’s sentiments about a need for solidarity and togetherness amid so much right-wing ugliness and administrative violence. “I just didn’t want to be alone,” he said.

In the Tesla Takedown movement, thousands of angry, frightened people have found a sense of collectivity. “The one good thing you can say about Musk is he has given people a symbolic and strategic place to gather and focus,” Starr said. “We can’t all go to Washington D.C. We can’t all go to Mar-a-Lago or even to a Trump property. But there are Tesla dealerships all over the country, and there are Tesla charging stations in even more places.”

As the movement’s momentum grew, a TeslaTakedown website and an Action Network site were launched to support the demonstrations, linking decentralized efforts and further instigating a global web of protest.

Last week, Tesla Takedown organizers hosted a virtual mass call to action on YouTube that drew more than 6,000 attendees. The event’s livestream has now been viewed more than 20,000 times. The call included elected officials, event organizers, industry experts, and celebrities such as actor and filmmaker Alex Winter, actor John Cusack, and U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett (D-TX).

Edward Niedermeyer, author of the book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors, also spoke during the call. Niedermeyer, who has a decade of experience comparing the hype Musk generates to facts on the ground, finds Musk’s bullshit-driven approach to politics consistent with his business strategies. “The whole premise is that he’s [running DOGE] because he’s really good at running businesses, and well, that’s just not true,” Niedermeyer told me. “If it were true, he wouldn’t be vulnerable to the Tesla Takedown. Of all of his businesses, the only one that’s ever made money is Tesla. And Tesla has been on the brink of bankruptcy basically its entire existence,” he said. “He’s never built it into something that is sustainable. Tesla’s sales are falling, and it’s about to go from being his only company that is profitable to another one of his companies that isn’t.”

“Elon Musk is good at building up hype, coming up with these ideas and these visions that investors put money into,” Niedermeyer said. “He’s able to inflate these bubbles, but he’s not good at running operational businesses.”

Niedermeyer says Musk’s efforts to gut federal programs and agencies reflect the billionaire’s “hack-a-thon” approach to problem-solving. “It’s this very Silicon Valley thing where you get a bunch of people together, and you feed them all Red Bull, and you keep them up, and you try and solve a big hairy problem in a big push,” he said.

Musk took a similar approach to dismantling Twitter’s workforce, moderation policies, and company infrastructure after acquiring the platform. Those efforts resulted in mass layoffs, the rampant amplification of Nazi propaganda, a collapse of ad revenue, and the mass proliferation of hoaxes and misinformation. While Musk likely doesn’t see Twitter’s deterioration as a failure — since it now lets him amplify right-wing lies and propaganda at scale — the consequences of dismantling government services are far more dire.

People are already dying due to Musk’s decision to put the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) “into the wood chipper,” and millions more will be lost if those services are not restored. As DOGE has attacked one agency after another, tens of thousands of federal workers have lost their jobs, and crucial scientific research and environmental preservation efforts have been brought to a halt. The private information of millions of Americans has been compromised, and critical government services have been imperiled.

Musk, who famously swung a chainsaw in the air at the Conservative Political Action Conference to celebrate the DOGE cuts, has publicly whined about the backlash to his actions, insisting that he has only “done productive things” and has “never done anything harmful.” Like Trump, Musk projects a confident, haughty persona, but often appears thin-skinned and emotionally injured by criticism.

Niedermeyer argues that Musk doesn’t actually understand the government mechanisms he’s been tampering with. “He doesn’t really understand the budgets, he doesn’t understand the budget processes, and he doesn’t understand the accounting systems that he’s working with,” Niedermeyer said. “He jumps in and pushes through with a lot of confidence. And again, this is how he runs his companies, and this is why none of them are really steadily profitable, smoothly operating, efficient, well-run businesses.”

Musk, like Trump, is a showman (albeit a less skilled one). “Right now, he’s trying to save Tesla by jumping in at the end of the quarter and trying to get the president to sell Teslas from the White House lawn,” Niedermeyer said. “He’s not there steadily running the business day-to-day so that he really understands it. He doesn’t really appreciate all the complexities of its operations. He parachutes in at the end of the quarter and puts out fires and tries to get the sales up and then goes back to doing whatever else he wanted to do.”

It remains to be seen whether Musk’s efforts or Trump’s interference will save his beleaguered car company. “We’re at this very specific moment where Tesla is at a tipping point,” Niedermeyer said. “People struggle to believe that he could be the richest man in the world, while he hasn’t built a sustainably profitable business, and yet that’s the case,” he said. Niedermeyer points to an ongoing lack of innovation at Tesla, as the electric vehicle market has continued to expand, and the failed spectacle of the Cybertruck’s debut as evidence of the company’s weakness. “It’s one thing to have a car that loses money if it makes your brand look cooler — a lot of companies do that. This is the opposite,” he says of the Cybertruck, which was recently recalled in the U.S. after glued-on side panels began falling off the vehicles.

Prior to going all-in on Trump’s presidential campaign, Musk was facing numerous federal probes and widespread criticism for his erratic behavior, including his impetuous purchase of Twitter, his failed attempt to abort the deal, and his use of the platform to spread right-wing conspiracies. Musk’s false promises about the pace of his companies’ innovations, including promised timelines for the development of autonomous vehicles and missions to Mars, had also damaged his credibility. “He’s in politics because the consequences of his actions are catching up with him. I mean, it’s just like Trump, right? He’s there to escape from the consequences of his actions. The political system is his refuge.”

However, Niedermeyer believes this strategy may be Musk’s undoing. “He really screwed up in that sense that he got into politics. He made himself more controversial than ever at a moment when he’s more vulnerable than ever.”

Tesla’s stocks have plunged in recent weeks. While the stock has rallied in recent days, some experts argue that those gains may be short-lived. Fierce competition in the electric vehicle markets of Europe and China, combined with Musk’s political infamy and the momentum of ongoing protests, increasingly threatens the company’s future.

Every Tesla Takedown activist I have spoken with has mentioned the possibility of a margin call — a financial crisis that could impact Musk and Tesla if the company’s stock’s value falls to $114. As Newsweek’s Hugh Cameron explains, “A margin call occurs when a borrower no longer has enough equity to meet the broker’s minimum requirements.” Musk has used Tesla stock as collateral to secure significant personal loans. “In Musk’s case, the price of Tesla stock used as collateral would fall below a certain price point, at which point he would be forced by the broker to either deposit more funds or liquidate assets,” Cameron wrote.

Protesters around the country are ready to exploit Musk’s vulnerabilities on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Musk, Trump, and the right-wing media apparatus have attempted to vilify and intimidate protesters. Trump has baselessly suggested that some isolated acts of vandalism at Tesla dealerships have been paid for “by people very highly political on the left.” Attorney General Pam Bondi subsequently stated that she would prosecute “those operating behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes.” Officials with the Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security, however, have issued a bulletin reporting that the “rudimentary” acts of vandalism directed at some Tesla properties do not appear to be coordinated, and should not result in the investigation of “constitutionally protected activity,” such as the Tesla Takedown protests.

Bondi has nonetheless attempted to tie Crockett’s statement on a Tesla Takedown mass call that Musk should be “taken down” with the discovery of incendiary devices at a Tesla showroom in Austin, Texas.

Trump has called vandals who have targeted Tesla “terrorists” and suggested that they could be sent to a prison in El Salvador. This threat, coupled with the administration’s conflation of protected speech with isolated acts of property destruction, links its hopes for the repression of protest to its illegal rendition of Venezuelan immigrants.

Musk has baselessly accused Valerie Costa, an environmental activist with a group called The Troublemakers, of “committing crimes” due to her participation in the Tesla Takedown protests. The allegation led to a harassment campaign against Costa. Other Tesla Takedown activists have also experienced doxxing and harassment, but the participants I spoke with appear undeterred. As protester Florence Chan recently told the San Francisco Chronicle, “It just makes me and a lot of other people more angry. It’s almost like a recruiting tool. They are recruiting people to this protest.”

Lava is similarly unmoved by the administration’s threats. “I’m living with no F’s to give,” Lava told me. “When you declare yourself a Nazi or do the Sig Heil, that’s a direct threat against my family. It’s not just about being angry. I’m Jewish, and to see the Sig Heil triggers something that we learned since we were in preschool.” Lava acknowledged that he has been subject to surveillance for his efforts. “They have facial recognition software. That’s the world we live in, and I just don’t care. So I’ve been like, ‘Screw it.’ We are there to destroy Tesla’s brand. And we’re getting results.”

Niedermeyer hopes that the defiant attitude of protesters will prevail and that people will converge on Tesla dealerships in great numbers this weekend. “Wall Street hedge funds pay attention to crowd sizes. So if we can do a big push on that day and turn out bigger crowds, they will notice, and it will cause people to sell the stock,” he said. “It’s a huge opportunity, and everything we can do here makes a difference.”

Note: You can find a Tesla Takedown protest near you here.