On Saturday, as Elon Musk was making headlines for his continued efforts at DOGE and dodging a lawsuit for offering money to Wisconsin voters ahead of the state’s Supreme Court race, thousands of people were outside Tesla dealerships around the world protesting him. The grassroots Tesla Takedown movement—a series of demonstrations against Musk, Trump, and what the two of them have wrought, in front of Musk’s most prominent business—had been gathering steam for weeks, and March 29th was billed a “global day of action.” Protests were held in more than two hundred and fifty cities worldwide, organizers say. In Boston, it was thirty-seven degrees, and protesters on Boylston Street wore wool hats and down coats as they called for an end to the “dictatorship of the billionaires”; in Manhattan, it was seventy-six and windy, good weather for lusty hollering (“Hey, hey! Ho, ho! Elon Musk has got to go!”). Hundreds of people gathered in the cobblestoned nook outside a Tesla showroom in the West Village, by the Standard hotel, chanting, holding posters, and playing instruments. Trump, predictably, had been demonizing anti-Tesla sentiment (while also promoting Tesla, in his strange vroom-vroom White House driveway moment), and the Justice Department recently declared that any violent acts against Tesla properties were to be considered domestic terrorism. And yet despite a huge banner at the West Village protest reading “BURN A TESLA / SAVE DEMOCRACY,” made more vivid by a demonstrator wearing a cardboard flaming-Cybertruck costume, all was peaceful. A few dozen people waved red placards with Musk’s face on them that said “I AM STEALING FROM YOU.” Some signs combined Tesla branding and fascist imagery—a swastika instead of an “S,” a logo with a Hitler mustache. Other signs: “MUCK FUSK,” “NO ONE VOTED FOR ELON MUSK,” “CONGRESS: PLEASE REMOVE THE DOG•E DOO! 💩.”
A woman in a colorful top and sunglasses struggled to take pictures of the crowd while holding an American flag and a large piece of poster board. It said “MUSK’S ATTEMPTED MURDERS” and then listed several federal agencies, including FEMA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, U.S.A.I.D., and the Department of Education. (The list ended with “+?????????”) The woman told me that she’s an enforcement attorney for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “I’ve been on administrative leave since February 10th—getting paid not to work,” she said. “So there’s some government efficiency.” She noted a couple of bright spots amid the gloom—that a preliminary injunction was helping slow DOGE’s damage to the agency, and that, for now, “They’re not allowed to destroy data. The DOGE people were given access to our internal systems and we were afraid they could be changing and deleting things.” (They had changed the agency’s website to read “404—Page Not Found.”) This was her first Tesla Takedown, but she’d been to other protests. “It’s not just people like me, who are directly affected by what Trump and Musk are doing,” she said. “It’s people who are just very worried about dismantling our government and our democracy. And it’s people of all ages, all backgrounds—we never know what we’re going to see. A member of a rock band came to one in front of the C.F.P.B. building. I think it was the Dropkick Murphys.”
A gray-haired man and white-haired woman observed the scene; the woman held an anti-Tesla sign. “This is a takeover of our country by unelected billionaires, in a way that is entirely corrupt,” the man, Stephen Loffredo, said. “Musk bought the Presidency for Trump, and now Trump is funnelling our taxpayer money into Musk’s pockets. And they’re attempting to dismantle our democracy, not to get too dramatic about it. It’s extremely worrying, and the Democratic Party as an institution is sitting on its hands. It’s up to the activists and others to be resisting now, before it’s too late.” What do you do when you’re not out protesting? I asked Loffredo. Signing amicus briefs, among other resistance measures: “I’m a constitutional-law professor,” he said, looking sombre.
Over loud chants of “Our neighbors are under attack! What do we do? Stand up, fight back!,” I talked to a grizzled man who wore an Army jacket and a rainbow-striped ribbon holding a weathered cardboard sign that said “TRUMP IS A TERRIBLE VICE PRESIDENT.” A former English-as-a-second-language instructor who lived in Europe for many years, working for himself, the man is now “very disabled,” he said—“I stand to lose everything.” He currently lives in “the butt end of Yonkers,” and he attends many protests throughout New York City. “This is my fourth Saturday doing this,” he said. He pointed over my shoulder. “Here’s a drone,” he said. “Every week, we have a drone.” Above Thirteenth Street, a large device with red lights flew toward the crowd like a robotic bat.
It was urgent that we all protest and get out in the streets, the man went on—including Democratic Party leaders. “Otherwise there’s no credibility. They need to be extremely oppositional. We need Abbie Hoffman tactics. We need to levitate the Pentagon again.”
Trump’s second term, so far, has lacked a certain Pentagon-levitating energy—the demoralized left hasn’t mustered the fervid mass public resistance of his first—and, in this landscape, the Tesla Takedown movement stands out. It has a clear and worthy villain, a tangible set of locations, and a few clear objectives—yet because Trump and Musk’s targets are legion and interconnected, Tesla Takedown has also become a vehicle for dissent of all kinds.
A “Free Palestine” chant broke out. Two young men, one in a plaid shirt, the other in a short-sleeved beige sweater, stood on the edge of the crowd; they were “old high-school buddies” and recent college graduates who now lived in Seattle and the Bay Area and had met up to hang out in New York. They’d happened upon the protest, but they weren’t first-timers. “I go to the one in Walnut Creek, California,” Ray Rigisich, in the sweater, said.
“I’ve never seen the country in this state of disarray and political unrest,” Devrim Eryurek, in the plaid shirt, said. “I’m part Turkish. You probably know that Turkey is ruled by a dictator, Erdoğan. What we’re experiencing here is a lot like what Turkey experienced almost twenty-five years ago at the start of this regime. My dad and I have been talking about how scary it is to see this country kind of slip and fall down that path.”
Rigisich said, “I graduated with a poli-sci degree at the end of last year, and it feels like all of the rules that I just learned have already gone out the window. It’s like it’s totally gone. And I studied international, so a lot of the geopolitical rules, like how countries are supposed to deal with each other, is gone.” What the Administration is doing affects everybody, he went on—like his dad, who’s disabled, and tens of thousands of people losing jobs, freedoms, rights. “I was just telling Dev that I don’t want it to have to take a spark to really get us to be upset . . . yet it feels almost like, I don’t want to say we’re being complacent, but I feel like this”—the protests—“should be bigger.”
Katherine Alford and Pat Almonrode, two of the demonstrators, were facilitators for the group Third Act NYC, which engages people over age sixty in pro-democracy and pro-environment action, often working in coalitions with other groups. “Everyone always thinks that people over sixty just get more conservative, and that’s just not true,” Alford said. “It’s ironic that, as a pro-democracy and pro-climate group, we’re protesting against electric cars. But you cannot sacrifice our democracy for one piece of the thing.”
Almonrode was happy to see members of the international press covering the demonstrations. “We want to make sure that the world understands that America is not Donald Trump, it’s not Elon Musk, it’s not DOGE, it is not the Republican lackeys in Congress,” he said. “It’s people like us, out in the streets.” He added, “They call people like us domestic terrorists.” Not so. “Trump himself is the biggest domestic terrorist.”
Jim Gialamas, a content strategist who lives in Williamsburg, told me that he has been to several protests since the election, including three Tesla Takedowns. “Protesting feels fantastic for about twenty-four hours,” he said. “Then you read the news.” He said that in protesting “you have to kiss a lot of frogs”—some fellow-protesters “say some things that are hard to take”—but, while he looks for compatriots, he remains committed. His wife has a chronic health condition, he said, and if programs like Medicare are dismantled, they could go “medically bankrupt.” He’d failed to see much political-activism interest among his younger neighbors in Williamsburg, which frustrated him. I pointed to Alford and Almonrode and told him about Third Act, and his face lit up: “Oh, yeah?”
We heard chanting, and we backed up as the crowd began to part. “Ooh—the ACT UP people are here,” Gialamas said. Dozens of members of the venerable activism-and-advocacy group marched into the center of the demonstration chanting that Elon Musk had to go. They had marched from the AIDS Memorial, several blocks away, and did a die-in—traditionally, lying on the ground to represent people killed by H.I.V./AIDS, but in this case they also recognized a much larger range of victims. Each die-in participant held a tombstone-shaped sign with a politics-related epitaph: “BLED OUT DURING MISCARRIAGE,” “DIED IN FLOOD, NO N.O.A.A. ALERT,” “MEASLES, NO VACCINE,” “R.I.P. TRUTH.”
This month marked the thirty-eighth anniversary of the founding of ACT UP, its longtime member Stephen Helmke told me later. The group was founded at a crisis point during the AIDS epidemic in the U.S., a time frantic for research, treatment, and answers. The Administration is already having a catastrophic effect on the spread of H.I.V./AIDS, he said, especially in Africa, owing to the effective closure of U.S.A.I.D. and to PEPFAR cuts. With the attacks on Medicare and Medicaid, Helmke added, he expected it to spread in the U.S., too. “There will be an inevitable blossoming of new infections and deaths, especially in Southern cities,” he explained. “Southern cities already have one of the highest incidences of new H.I.V. cases, due to the lack of prevention efforts on their state levels and a lack of actual primary care in H.I.V., which means that so many more people are walking around undiagnosed and untreated.” He thinks of the advent of the PrEP era, in 2012, as ACT UP 2.0, he said—“and this is ACT UP 3.0. This is, inevitably, our make or break. This is like every trilogy. It’s now or never.”
A distinguished-looking man on the edge of the demonstration, who wore a black jacket with the subtle logo of a space-wear brand, turned out to work in the space industry. He’d come to the protests feeling “anger,” he said. “This is pulling us all apart.” He seemed to be shaking his head about the convergence of many bad trends at once. “I did admire Elon for his work in the space industry. He was so far ahead. But now . . . I’m sure there are layoffs planned at NASA imminently.” An immigrant himself, the man has been here for decades. “I love this country,” he said. And what Musk and Trump are doing now is “breaking apart this glue that held the world together.” The protests are useful for a nation reeling from what’s happening, he said. “We haven’t found our footing yet. The protests are the first step. We need to figure out what’s next.”
In the space community, he said, Musk was widely admired, and widely resented. “SpaceX is an independent entity in the space industry—almost their own world. They don’t play with others.” Venture-capital money is drying up. “Blue Origin will get the scraps of what’s left,” he said, referring to Jeff Bezos’s space-tech business. “It’s interesting how a national newspaper has been redefined to protect a space company.” As for the man’s own endeavors, he said, he’d been shifting gears, toward safety products. He smiled grimly. “Disaster is the new black,” he said. A few feet away, as the protest drew to a close, a new chant rang out: “We’ll be back! We’ll be back!” ⧫
