'Horrified' Tesla owners 'feel embarrassed' as anti-Musk sticker sales boom

29 November 2024

Editor’s Note: This headline has been updated.

During the 2024 presidential race, one of Donald Trump's most generous donors was Elon Musk. And Trump, having narrowly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, is thanking the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and X (formerly Twitter) by offering him a position in his incoming administration.

Trump has proposed creating a new federal government agency that would be called the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and would be headed by Musk and MAGA businessman Vivek Ramaswamy (one of the Republicans Trump defeated in the 2024 GOP presidential primary).

Musk, in recent years, has taken a far-right turn politically. And he has become a prominent figure in the MAGA movement, spending a lot of time with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Far-right "War Room" host Steve Bannon even considers Musk's support the primary reason for Trump's victory.

But according to Guardian reporters Oliver Milman and Marina Dunbar, Musk's politics might be bad for business.

"As Elon Musk has embraced Donald Trump and various far-right conspiracy theories," Milman and Dunbar explain in an article published on November 29, "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."

The Guardian journalists continue, "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 U.S. presidential election, as owners of Teslas, the car brand headed by Musk, try to distance themselves from the South African-born multibillionaire."

Milman and Dunbar note that before Musk went total MAGA, the Tesla/SpaceX CEO was "considered an environmental hero and technology pioneer by many U.S. liberals."

"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," the Guardian reports observe. "Musk is now intimately involved in Trump's incoming administration, heading a new 'Department of Government Efficiency' that plans mass layoffs of U.S. government workers. Some Tesla owners have been left horrified."

Read The Guardian's full article at this link.

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