Can’t vouch for the legitimacy of any of these groups (do speak up in the comments, if you’re better informed!), but if anyone was looking for a weekend project… TeslaTakedown.com
Here's where to find or start your own Tesla Takedown. actionnetwork.org/event_campai…
— daileyink.bsky.social (@daileyink.bsky.social) February 20, 2025 at 10:41 AM
Over the weekend, hundreds of protesters demonstrated at #Tesla (TSLA) dealerships across the country, as well as several international locations. Dubbed "Tesla Takedown" & “Tesla Takeover," the protests were coordinated by groups like Anonymous on Bluesky. finance.yahoo.com/news/sell-yo…
— Lee West (@whodat35.bsky.social) February 19, 2025 at 8:05 PM
Elon Musk’s controversial role in the Trump administration appears to be dragging down the Tesla CEO’s image — and Tesla’s own brand — during a pivotal time for the EV industry.
Over the weekend, hundreds of protesters demonstrated at Tesla (TSLA) dealerships across the country, as well as several international locations. Dubbed “Tesla Takedown” and “Tesla Takeover,” the protests were coordinated by groups like Anonymous on Bluesky (an x.com alternative)…
Musk going from “EV Jesus” to “MAGA god” is hurting Tesla’s brand image, said Mike Murphy, veteran GOP strategist and CEO of American EV Jobs Alliance, to Automotive News. “Musk has more of a MAGA identity than an electric car identity. He’s a nightmare for the Tesla chief marketing officer because he’s now in the way.”
Case in point: The survey polled likely EV buyers about their brand perception. Among EV competitors Ford, Toyota, and VW, Tesla had the lowest favorable rating (63%) and highest unfavorable (37%).
Tesla’s diminished popularity comes at a time when federal EV tax credits could be cut under the Trump administration, meaning Tesla would have to compete on a more even ground with foreign automakers. The loss of EV tax credits would also push sales lower for the entire EV industry, of which Tesla is highly levered to given its all-EV product portfolio.
Even Tesla employees fear Musk has damaged the company’s brand, as documented in a recent recording of a Tesla staff meeting obtained by the Washington Post. In another portion of the meeting, senior managers apparently indicated Tesla would be better off if Musk resigned…
I never thought I'd die side by side with Lamborghini-driving TikTokers, but these kids understand the assignment and I couldn't be more proud of them
www.roadandtrack.com/news/a638561…— O.K. Computermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 21, 2025 at 2:19 PM
E.W. Neidermeyer has been highlighting Tesla’s shortfalls for at least a decade, so you can’t blame him for taking pleasure in the current moment…
How's that Twitter deal aging? How's Tesla's car business doing? How's that bet on Elon's magic self-driving beans feeling right about now? Go ask the one analyst who is too smart to be popular how good SpaceX's business really looks.
The real letdown is still coming, bro. The signs are all there.
— O.K. Computermeyer (@niedermeyer.online) February 15, 2025 at 10:18 AM
Wall Street goofed extra bad here, because now Americans have no way to get rid of their hype bubble oligarch politically except by destroying his hype bubble empire. The only path out of Musk’s unelected coup runs directly through the capital markets, and the fragile valuations that prop him up.
When this is all over, the banker boys are going to understand why it’s important to, at the very least, give people the illusion that they can vote for their government. Now that even that pretense has been stripped aside, we have to pursue politics by other means. Now they are on the menu.
When Wall Street feels fear more than they feel greed, the calculation will change. They know that Musk’s businesses produce very little actual economic value, and its valuations can’t be sustained. They will start trimming their positions, notice others are, then we get a tsunami of fleeing rats.
This is the message we need to send at #TeslaTakedown protests today: we know Tesla’s trillion dollar valuation is built on fraud and abuse, and we are coming for it. We will make Tesla ownership a taboo, cars and stock, unthinkable to anyone who believes in the basic values of the U.S. constitution…
We, the people, are holding all the cards here. Elon Musk has bluffed Wall Street into a completely indefensible position, and then forced us to attack that position in order to stop him. We can do it! His wealth is all on paper. His technology is fake. His valuations are indefensible. We can win!
Ceci n est pas mon nym
There are three trumpy lawns I see on my dog walks: two with campaign signs and one that’s been flying a T***p 2024 flag.
Today I noticed the flag is gone. I take that as a positive sign.
We have unfortunate family ties to SpaceX (a nephew and his fiancee are aerospace engineers working for them). My SIL has been reduced to “well, his politics are awful but he’s still a brilliant engineer”. Nephew & fiancee are ACTUAL brilliant engineers. I wonder if he’s lost his luster in their eyes yet.
Tom Levenson
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: He’s not an engineer at all! Certainly not one with any relevant aerospace engineering knowledge.
The lengths people go to dupe themselves.
Boris Rasputin (The Evil Twin)
I’m old enough to recall the taunt, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” No one ever looked at it the other way: “IF you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?” Something about a fool and his money, perhaps.
Raoul Paste
Wall Street’s “hype bubble oligarch”
Nice. About a week ago Barrons put out an article about Warren Buffett selling stocks, and why he was wrong.. A laughable attempt on their part to prop things up.
The Dow is down 715 today.
edited
NickM
I sent emails to two businesses in my town that advertise their business on the side of (I guess) the owner’s Cybertruck, telling them I would never do business with them and why.
They don’t understand aesthetics if they drive a truck like that (one was a home decorator)
They spent $80k on something that wasn’t worth it — what will they do to my job estimates?
Their trucks indicate that they support fascists.
I hope it has an effect, even if it’s just the owners’ higher blood pressure.
Jay
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
@Tom Levenson:
Old Dan and Little Ann
Those Lamborghini videos posted are hilarious. It would be better if they weren’t driving….you know….Lamborghinis. Not exactly the symbol for your average American.
trollhattan
@Jay: Wharton not covering themselves with glory, given Donny purportedly went, if not actually attending classes, there.
Another Scott
Meanwhile, unsurprisingly, Musk might have violated the Hatch Act.
(Might is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.)
Best wishes,
Scott.
Jackie
O/T, but potentially interesting in a gossipy way:
A reporter, one assumes?
Jay
https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-sends-resolute-desk-out-for-refurbishment-after-musks-son-appeared-to-wipe-booger-on-it/
Ceci n est pas mon nym
First world problems: A few minutes ago I got a Chewy.com order which I placed on Monday. Not too bad, except that Chewy has gotten me accustomed to deliveries so fast we joke about “Looney Tunes Delivery” (Bugs Bunny puts a letter in the mailbox and immediately a truck drives up with the delivery). The original delivery promise via FedEx was yesterday morning (already longer than I’ve got used to expecting), and that got pushed back 3-4 times till it finally arrived at 3 pm today.
I assume all breakdowns in consumer experience or quality of life since Jan 20 are probably Elon’s fault, though I admit it’s a stretch to figure out what he might have done to screw up FedEx.
trollhattan
@Jackie:
“woman”
[bang] “Case dismissed, you are free to go, sir.”
Chris
I’d have more sympathy for this and more hope of it leading to anything if the same fucking thing didn’t happen after every single presidential party changeover; all of a sudden, a bunch of not-totally-insane businessmen discover to their shock and astonishment that Republicans, just like last time, the time before that, and the time before that, are in fact not so good for the economy, or even for their business.
I still remember the HMO tycoon’s daughter my friends and I knew in the late 2000s, who kept explaining to us over and over how horrible the ACA was going to be. A few years later I run into her again in DC. “Oh yeah! I just came down for a quick trip. My dad’s here on business.” “Really. What business is that?” “Oh, he’s lobbying Congress not to repeal the ACA after all. That would be really bad for the health industry…”
Yes of course they’re still Republicans, why do you ask?
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
“That’s not a Hatch, it’s a door.”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Another Scott:
Republican administrations are walking Hatch Act violations. Having been a federal employee and scrupulous about the rules (and recognizing why they’re important), that stuff really angers me.
Some Trump press-weenie in the first term was asked about that, and she just laughed and said, “yeah, let me know the first time somebody goes to jail for a Hatch act violation”. I’m still angry about that.
And it didn’t start with Trump. I remember stories from the W administration, where the new agency head stands up at their first meeting and says “OK, let’s discuss how our agency can help re-elect the president”.
Spanky
@Jay: The Onion weeps.
Jay
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
Might be weather related, the East Coast is having some.
Suzanne
LMMFAO.
Most toddlers have better pattern recognition than these clowns.
Geminid
So much winning! Tesla stock is down 20.34% since January 21, the day after Trump was inaugurated.
It would have been down more except for a late bump that turned today’s drop of almost 5.4% at 3:45pm to 4.68% at closing time, 4pm.
Chris
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
See also pretty much the entire security state, from the federal version of beat cops all the way up to FBI directors.
trollhattan
@Jay:
My kid has had more snow in one winter at NC than she has seen her previous 22 years. Except for the driving thing, it’s mostly fun. Okay, her California wardrobe is another issue.
We only drive to the stuff.
Jay
MuskWatch has become a go to,
https://www.muskwatch.com/p/the-week-in-musk-who-runs-doge
lowtechcyclist
@Raoul Paste:
Didn’t know about Buffett selling stocks, but I’ve been gradually reducing our holdings since the election. Our portfolio is now just 15% in the market, and the rest in cash and equivalents.
Jay
@trollhattan:
We get a few inches of snow a year, on average, once every decade, a “SuperStorm”, we have had about 4″ here so far, and it looks like there won’t be any more.
While some people drive to the snow, (Whistler, Blackcomb, Hollyburn), most people take Skytrain, then a bus, (Cypress, Seymour) or Skytrain, bus, gondola, (Grouse).
Skytrain, bus, gondola are 1/4 the price of gas and parking.
If it’s a good spring, you can ski in the morning and swim in the ocean in the afternoon.
Jackie
@Jay:
BWAAHAHAHAHA!!!
Old School
@lowtechcyclist:
Looks like he sold index funds. He still owns plenty of stocks.
S Cerevisiae
I hope this has an effect and Phony Stark’s popularity continues to plummet.
kindness
Monty Python was right. The biggest Twits are always rich people.
Jay
Minor earthquake here, maybe a 4.6? Hard to tell as 25 floors up kinda amps the building’s response. The first aftershock was a bit smaller than the first shock.
A Ghost to Most
Woke up to 7″ of new snow, but half is gone already, and the rest will evaporate by tomorrow. Snow is highly ephemeral here. Fuck Muskrat Bastard and his Swasticars.
lowtechcyclist
Their stated objectives were vengeance, retribution, and punching down on everyone other than straight white males. Rounding up and deporting eleven million brown-skinned furriners. And tariffs and trade wars.
Sure, easy to confuse all that with seeking peace and prosperity. If someone removed their brains and filled the cranial cavity with Miracle Whip.
Baud
@Geminid:
That’s one way to address income inequality.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
We poor libs were cursed with foresight instead of hindsight.
Raoul Paste
@Old School: Let’s call it accumulating cash.
lowtechcyclist
@Old School:
Index funds are made up of stocks.
I’m sure he owns plenty of stocks even still, but the point is he clearly thought this was a good time to reduce his holdings, and in a way that said he thinks the market as a whole will go down.
Chris
@kindness:
They’re the only ones who can afford to be.
Chris
@Baud:
True democracy is when everybody’s lost everything and has to live in the shit together.
(… why did we bother fighting the Cold War, again? Rotten eggs and the safety of mankind?)
hitchhiker
Seattle, 2016 primary season.
We still had caucuses then, and ours was on a spring afternoon. Massive turnout in our extremely Bernie-Happy precinct, even though by that time in the process he could not have caught up with the remaining delegates.
That’s context.
I’m bringing it up because one of the conversations I had that day with one of the young Bernie people went like this:
Him: Just everything is fucked up, you know?
Me: Well, not everything. A lot of things are.
Him: And sometimes I just want to burn it all down! Blow it all up!
Me: Really? All of it?
Him: Okay … half of it.
Me: I don’t think that’s an option … it’s like saying you want to explode half your car and still have it be drivable.
Well, here we are. They wanted someone to blow up the stuff they don’t like, and our whole history of being able to make the government work persuaded them that it would all be fine. Musk himself thinks this. Just take a chain saw to it, and if you wreck something that was important, you can always go back and fix it! Laws, shmaws! Legal, shmegal!
Stability is the thing bankers like. Instability and chaos is what the thug and all his little thuglets like. I wonder what will happen next.
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway company also owns some sizable businesses outright. An example is the Burlington Northern/Santa Fe Railroad, one of the two largest railroads in the United States.
trollhattan
IDK if it’s possible to get at the video through the paywall, but the sound clarifies how loud this thing is.
Techbros are preselling their flying car @ $300k a pop.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article300758284.html
What could possibly go wrong?
Jay
@Jay:
I was off a bit, a 5.1 magnitude earthquake, Southern Vancouver Island, Gulf Coast, Lower Mainland, Fraser Valley, all the way out to Alberta.
Still haven’t received the Earthquake Warning Alert.
RandyG
Protests at the Tucson, AZ Tesla dealership this Saturday (2/22) — I’ll be there tomorrow — and next Saturday (3/1).
Protest at the corner of River and Oracle*. We will congregate again, at 9:30 am in the Red Lobster parking lot next door, so our cars are gone by 11:00 when the restaurant opens.
*River & Oracle is one of the major commercial intersections in NW Tucson.
Jackie
First causality of FFOTUS’s dissatisfaction with his administration’s immigrant daily headcount:
The FFOTUS must have gotten the news that Biden had done a better job.
VFX Lurker
Lot of overlap between Bernie Bros and MAGA.
Chris
@trollhattan:
This is an extremely good idea, and to show us how good the product is, the first person to fly over New York City in it should totally be the CEO. It’ll be just like that time Elon Musk demonstrated how bulletproof his Cybertruck’s windows were by throwing a rock at them, but on a grander scale.
(By the way, since the topic came up yesterday evening of how people fifteen years ago thought Musk was a savior and are now horrified to realize what he really is? As someone who mostly didn’t follow him closely in the 2010s, I don’t know when exactly this happened relative to his political evolution. But speaking for myself, the moment I saw Musk break his unbreakable car window in front of a national audience is when I firmly flipped from “he’s a zillionaire, which means he’s overrated as fuck by definition, but at least he’s doing some good things with electric cars, I dunno, I have no strong feelings” to “okay, this guy is a total fucking clown just like the rest of them.”)
espierce
@trollhattan:
George Jetson on line 1
The Thin Black Duke
@hitchhiker: Black people want a piece of the pie that some white people are willing to throw in the garbage, thinking it’s a revolutionary act.
Chris
@hitchhiker:
The bankers are too thick to know what they like, or at least they’re too thick to make the connection between what the stability they like in their economy and which party’s more likely to bring it about, despite running the same experiment again and again and again and always coming up with the same result. Which is why they keep backing the thugs and thuglets to the hilt, only to be horrified when they represent instability and chaos, again. And then going and doing it all over again four years later.
Old School
@lowtechcyclist: So I guess we agree?
trollhattan
Good lord man, has Musk bought it recently?
SuzieC
TeslaTakedown protest in front of dealership in Easton shopping district tomorrow 4:30, Columbus.
trollhattan
“Loser” in having a time of it funding 75 years of pensions in advance. Now whose idea what that, again?
Fucker.
trollhattan
Making friends and influencing people, Bannon-style.
Am sure it’s all just a misunderstanding. (Hey, the French, can you keep him busy there anyway? Thanks.)
Geminid
@Jackie: At least your Congressman is taking a stand! From the Tri City Herald:
Dan Newhouse doesn’t pull his punches!
Reporter Annete Cary’s article was actually pretty good once I got past Newhouse’s tapdancing. Senator Patty Murray’s responses were much more forthright. There is information on the federal installations in question: the Hanford nuclear site, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the Bonneville dam..
Chris
@trollhattan:
Too Nazi for the FN. Jesus fucking Christ.
Also, man, I’m so old I remember when American far-rightists were the ones who occasionally got cold feet over their European partners for being too out-of-the-closet about the Nazi thing. Remember Charles Johnson, the high priest of Islamophobia all through the 2000s, finally realizing that what he’d been doing was bad when he went to a conference in Europe and realized that all of his contacts across the Atlantic were literal swastika-wearing National Socialists?
trollhattan
@Geminid: Hanford alone has enough cleanup work for another several generations.
Geminid
@trollhattan: On the other hand, if we just terminate the cleanup we won’t have to worry about the next several generations. Try thinking outside the box!
Chris
@trollhattan:
I’ve been a soccer fan for twenty-seven years, that’s not what a wave looks like.
Now that, I believe.
Jay
@trollhattan:
It’s a BC Provincial Emergency Alert system via text. T get’s her’s about 15 minutes before I get mine, so I am guessing that as it was already over, they cancelled the back log.
It works well for floods, forest fires, tsunami’s, shelter in place, not so well for earthquakes that they had no advance warnings of.
Jackie
@Geminid: I saw that! I actually called and left him a voicemail thanking him for taking firm stance. Lol
I was much more effusive and honestly thankful when I left a voicemail with Murray.
Newhouse “knows” he squeaked through his re-election with the help of a lot of Democratic voters. It was him or FFOTUS’s endorsed MAGA candidate.
NaijaGal
@Tom Levenson: He’s a Wharton Weenie (what the UPenn computer and information science students used to call dot com era business students who were trying to monetize the CIS students’ ideas).
NaijaGal
He’s a “Wharton Weenie” (what UPenn computer and information science students used to call dot com era business school students who were trying to monetize the CIS students’ ideas).
NaijaGal
@Tom Levenson:
He’s a “Wharton Weenie” (what the UPenn computer and information science students used to call dot com era business school students who were trying to monetize the CIS students’ ideas).
Gretchen
Expletive Deleted
Weirdly there are two Tesla dealerships near(ish) me in Newcastle, neither seems to have anything organized for tomorrow though.
London is a bit far to get to, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for next time.
Geminid
@Jackie: It sounds like the MAGA Volk are on the rise in your district. It will be interesting to see their strength in 2026. If they continue to rise they ought to be able to take Newhouse out.
That might open up a path for a strong Democratic candidate, as happened in WA03 in 2022. That’s when Jaime Herrera Butler got knocked out in the jungle primary, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez squeaked by Joe Kent in November
Ed. I think we’ll see some strong Democratic candidates in Purple and light Red districts next cycle.
Starfish (she/her)
Tesla owners who want to like their cars and dislike Musk’s fascism are being silenced on reddit, and at least one street Tesla has been graffitied in Seattle. People are also graffitiing the Tesla charging stations.
Betty
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: ,My recent Fed Ex delivery was over a day late, but that wasn’t as bad as my brother’s USPS express mail delivery which was four days late. It was sent between two PA towns and traveled through Arizona on the way. Why?
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
When you dive head first off a bridge 75 feet (or more!) above a freeway moving at the speed limit because your head is the most useless part of your body, it’s already shown before being run over by a semi truck and trailer that there is nothing inside of said head, other than completely hardened concrete. IOW nothing useful for any thing except being walked upon or driven over – as shown by the last time this dipshit was elected.
Jay
@Starfish (she/her):
The simple /reddit solution is to not defend the car, because it comes across these days as a sales pitch for Tesla and Musk.
The simple way to ensure that your Tesla is not vandalized, is to go to Esty, spend $1.25 on one of the variations of “I bought this car, before I knew he was a Nazi,” bumper stickers.
The Tesla charging stations can handle a lot of spray paint with out it effecting their use.
Ruckus
@trollhattan:
What could possibly go wrong?
EDT
Every Damn Thing
Sister Golden Bear
@trollhattan: I’m sure the owners will enjoy the process of getting an FAA pilot license to fly the thing. The flight instruction is the easy part, there’s a huge amount of info you have to learn and memorize to pass the written test.
‘Course Musk will just kill the FAA, so what was I thinking….
different-church-lady
GODDAMN YOU ARE ROCK FUCKING STUPID!!!
Liminal Owl
@Jay: I have never before heard of a Bachelor of Arts (rather than Science) in physics. Is that just me? I’d say maybe they were sending a subtle signal to viewers, but because it’s Penn that’s very unlikely.
Miss Bianca
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: My Chewy order was late this month as well, which it never is, usually. As a sign of coming Apocalypse, it ain’t much, perhaps, but…possibly telling.
Uncle Cosmo
Not quite “just you,” I suppose – but FTR my Physics degree from Johns Hopkins** is a B.A.
** With “general and departmental honors”, so not exactly a watered down version. Put it this way: it (plus GREs plus recommendations) was good enough for Carl Sagan to call me & offer a research assistantship in astronomy at Cornell.