The Time To Stop Elon Musk Is Now: Boycott Tesla
Trump is an obvious danger to democracy but, ultimately, Musk may be just as big a threat.
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Last week I broached the alarming similarities between Trump and Hitler.
Little did I know that just hours after my column was sent out, Elon Musk would do this:
The right wing quickly divided between those who denied that Musk meant that to be a Sieg Heil salute, and those who said it was — and wasn’t that awesome!
Those who said it wasn’t quickly used AI to search for what appeared to be still pictures of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and others with what appeared to be a similarly angled straight arm. Of course, nobody bothered to point out the, ahem, somewhat different values and context known to be in play with these different people.
Only one of them has allowed his platform to promote antisemitic ideas and theories. Only one has himself given credence to those.
Of course, many decried it. But it was far from unanimous.
When Musk made his starkly Hitlerian salute, legacy media quickly ran some quotes dismissing the gesture. One “expert” pointed out that Musk is a socially awkward person with autism, and, we are told, this means that he certainly, probably, maybe, didn’t know what he was doing and it just kind of came out that way — shades of Dr. Strangelove.
And the Anti-Defamation League — whose online mission statement begins with a commitment “to stop the defamation of the Jewish people” — outrageously posted that Musk’s straight arm was but “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm.”
The ADL may once have forefronted fighting antisemitism wherever it rears its head, but long ago embraced a largely right-wing agenda, regularly attacking as “antisemitic” anyone who questions Israeli government actions — including the devastation of Gaza over the past year. Its leadership can’t seem to get enough of Trump and Musk, and so they stretched benefit-of-the-doubt far past its breaking point to whitewash the Nazi-like imagery. Even the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said Musk was being “falsely smeared” because of the gesture.
Trump’s supporters like to excuse Musk’s (and Trump’s) behavior by claiming moral equivalency — “everyone does it” (whatever it is) and everyone is a hypocrite — but of course the record does not support that. Consider how Democrats in Congress have consistently, if arguably with an overabundance of caution, investigated or supported investigations of their own members charged with wrongdoing. And there simply are no parallels to the particular kind of rule- and norm-breaking behavior now being displayed on a daily basis by Trump and his Team.
And if there is still doubt, we have the fact that among those Trump pardoned was this man:
Starting to get the idea?
Even Musk gets it. In reply to the ADL post, he wrote:
So he’s not even seeking to clarify his actions, and thinks the whole thing is… funny.
A year ago, in response to being accused of antisemitism, Musk made what was apparently a public relations gesture and visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. He said he found the experience “incredibly moving.”
But on January 24, 2025, Julie Gray, the wife of a Holocaust survivor who was with Musk at the time, said Musk “was not moved by it,” “did not care” and “was utterly detached” — but “cared about how he looked.”
Is she right?
Schemes, Scams, and Scares
What other wonderfully salutary activities is Elon Musk involved with? Well, maybe election manipulation. Could he do it? Not sure. Would he do it if he could? Consider this:
The other day, Trump — who often blurts the secret part out loud, apparently because he can’t help himself — made some curious comments about Musk, which sounded to many as if he was praising Musk for rigging the computers to ensure a Trump win in Pennsylvania.
He knows those computers better than anybody. All those computers. Those vote-counting computers. And we ended up winning Pennsylvania like in a landslide.
Whatever he meant precisely, we do know that Elon Musk donated at least $277 million to help Trump win, and was muscularly active in every aspect of Trump’s effort to get out friendly votes — especially his use of X as a pro-Trump echo chamber, but also a vast and opaque multistate paid door-knocking operation, Most likely, without Musk, Trump would actually have lost. That makes Musk a man to monitor closely and to worry about.
That’s for many reasons, not least of which is that Musk, like Trump, takes no prisoners. There are going to be consequences for us all. As one veteran Hollywood talent manager and producer told Vulture:
There’s more fear in the executive suites now than there ever has been in the 26 years that I’ve been doing this. Everybody from the buyers on down are afraid to be bold and to make decisions that put them in harm’s way.
Having just won an election by falsely blaming violent crime on immigrants and promising to clamp down on them, Trump’s first actions, as we know, included releasing from prison hundreds of dangerous criminals who make up his shock troops. A notable example was the creator of Silk Road, an outlaw online marketplace for deadly drugs, acclaimed as a hero by the crypto bro set, of which Musk is a big part and major booster.
Musk is a volatile ingredient in the whole combustible mess. The examples of Musk’s behavior threatening to democracy, to tranquility, to decency are legion. Some have been noted by WhoWhatWhy in the past. (Go here and here.)
Relentless Bombardment of Right-Wing Crap
Musk’s misuse of a powerful social media megaphone to spread dangerous misinformation is well known. The daily examples of what he has his staff do are less dramatic but no less nefarious. To wit: Even though (or perhaps because) his algorithm tells him that I don’t buy extreme right-wing crap, X keeps feeding my account mostly… extreme right-wing crap.
Consider this screen shot I just took while pondering all this. These are live presentations you can tune into on the site itself. At that very moment, I was being offered, directed to, encouraged to dip into these five:
As for the only apparently Trump-critical conversation he offered out of the five — a post from Black people saying “Trump hates Black people” — what kind of reaction do you suppose that’s intended to foster now that X has become the prime platform for racist fulminations?
Spreading such stuff is a ploy right out of Joseph Goebbels’s playbook. And this is not a sometime thing on X but a constant.
The Dems Blew It
It’s late in the game. Because when there was a good chance of countering this foul spew, people didn’t want to take it. That includes people in the Biden administration who dealt with attacks from the Trump-Musk Machine not by pushing back aggressively, but rather by trying to prove how proper and fair they were.
In an article about Trump’s plans for retribution and the Biden administration’s weak efforts to hold him accountable previously, one expert notes:
Trump was going to accuse President Biden of weaponizing the Justice Department against him regardless of when or how the D.O.J. prosecuted Trump for these crimes. Garland’s hesitation to pursue accountability out of fear of Trump’s inevitable baseless accusations ultimately helped Trump delay accountability until he escaped it altogether.
How to Push Back?
OK, so. What to do? Surely we’re all thinking about this.
The other day, I got into a car driven by a Lyft driver. A Tesla. Nice car. But I felt ambivalent about getting in.
Which raises a question we all confront these days: How do we stop empowering, acquiescing to, or even just practicing benign indifference toward maniacs like Musk while continuing to transfer our own hard-earned wealth into their pockets, only to see it marshalled against us and everything we believe in?
The good news is that pushback against the Trumpian Purge has begun. And so have challenges to Musk. These include:
— Musk’s endorsement of far-right forces in Europe has led to something called “Tesla shame.” To find out how widespread the feeling is in the Netherlands, a current affairs news program took a poll, and found that “nearly every third Tesla customer contemplated ditching the brand if they hadn’t already.”
— Four lawsuits against DOGE for not following transparency and disclosure laws.
— The SEC sued Musk because he tactically delayed disclosing his ownership of Twitter stock before buying the company. That delay resulted in Musk being able to underpay — by at least $150 million — for shares he bought afterward.
— A class action by thousands of Twitter investors who say they suffered large financial losses when they sold Twitter stock at artificially depressed prices, owing to what they allege was deception by Musk.
— A class action against Musk by registered voters who signed his petition to support the Constitution in return for a chance to win his supposedly random $1 million-a-day giveaway — though it was later discovered that winners were predetermined.
— A federal judge dismissed Musk’s lawsuit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate for alerting the public when X failed to remove posts containing dis- and misinformation that actually violated X’s own content guidelines.
— French president Emmanuel Macron demanded that the EU fight back against Musk’s online political attacks against the governments of France, Germany, Spain, and the UK.
— Europe’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, owner of the luxury empire LVMH, sued Musk’s X for using his newspapers’ content without the proper payment mandated under European law.
The Urgency
If this all still feels irrelevant to your own life, it’s not. Someday soon, the Musk-backed and Trump-ordered release of Oath Keeper leader Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boy leader Enrique Tarrio — and their violent followers — may directly affect you or your loved ones.
What to do? I know it isn’t about “get off X” because that just removes voices of sanity from the largest platform. Challenging Musk on his own turf, as long as that is possible, has real value.
But we will, together, find meaningful ways to fight back. And here’s one: In Germany, a number of companies have already declared their intent to halt purchases of Tesla vehicles.
Everyone should be doing that, and right here in the United States. The TESLA BOYCOTT needs to start now.
what you've stated is more proof that Israel is a fascist state- and because it is, it is dragging America into endless wars. Prior to Trump, America's governments recognized this reality, yet had to deal with Israel's so very successful propaganda, but not Trump. Instead, he is actively encouraging ethnic cleansing. Moreover, he actually lies in that he states both Jordan and Egypt agrees to this (why aren't mainstream media calling him out on this?). America has bases in the Middle East - in the Arab countries (funny enough, not in Israel). How long will they be there now? As to the voting machines - where again is mainstream media? By their silence and inaction they are enablers in the destruction of the USA - and the world.
Trump is insisting that Palestinians be "cleared out" of Gaza. Such an action would indeed meet the definition of "ethnic cleansing".
Martin Bormann was to Hitler and Nazism what Musk is to Trump and MAGA: a "gray eminence" exerting limitless influence over his in-name-only Fuhrer and shaping immense financial resources to ensure long-term, prosperous survival of the foundational cult.