Over the weekend, protestors marched outside all 277 Tesla showrooms. The effort was the first time for many protestors to show up on the picket line.
The protests received widespread media coverage from local press while the national media largely ignored the protests. Payday has organized some of this local press coverage so that our readers can get a sense of the size of the movement.
“This is a constitutional crisis,” Lisa Caldwell of Syracuse told Urban CNY. “People from all walks of life—many of whom have never protested before—are stepping up because the checks and balances of our government are under attack.”
At a time, when the courts and established law seem unable to stop Musk’s assault on the constitution and federal government, many activists hope that protesting outside Tesla will have an effect. Already, his stock has tanked by 50% in the last three months.
"There’s no way to really get to him unless it’s through his companies. He wasn’t elected, he was appointed," Robert Campbell, an organizer of the Tesla Takedown rally in Santa Clara, California told KVTU.
Many activists said that the protests and their effect on Tesla’s stock price have inspired them to keep fighting.
“I don’t want to sit back and read the news and say ‘Oh my gosh, this is all so bad,‘”Sandra Rhude, a mother of seven, told the Star Tribune at a protest in Minneapolis . “Let’s do something. We’ve got to do something.”
Even protestors overseas in England and elsewhere showed up to protest Musk.
"If we can just put one or two people off buying a Tesla today to help spread the message and get his stock to go down further and further, hopefully that will give Elon and other billionaires like him the pause to think twice about what they're doing," Karl Scholz said at a protest in Bristol, England.
The protests appear to be having a real effect and gaining popular momentum. At a series of rallies around the country held by former Democratic vice presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, he read out lead about how much Tesla’s stock has declined.
“There’s this thing on my phone, I know some of you know this, on the iPhone. They’ve got that little stock app.I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day…225 and dropping,” Walz joked as he looked at his IPhone.
The quip by the former vice presidential candidate got Elon Musk to cry foul.
“I mean, you have Tim Walz, who’s a huge jerk, running around on stage with the Tesla stock price, where the stock price had gone in half, and he was overjoyed,” Musk said during an interview with Fox News on Friday, the day before the protests.
Organizers think that Musk’s comments helped to swell crowds for the Tesla Takedown protests this week.
"Everything he says brings more people out to protest against him. What he says about unions, trans people, government employees," Hank Kennedy told the Detroit News at a protest in Troy, Michigan. "I'd like to see him fired and these cuts reversed. I think that's the end goal and how we're doing that is we're aiming to damage his wallet ... so if that means people boycotting Tesla, divesting themselves of stock, if that's the only way we can fight back peacefully ... that's what we're doing."
