Democrats Want to Break Elon by Making Him Poorer

The Tesla Takedown movement has been a success. Dems want it to grow even bigger.

President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, with Musk’s son X, stand next to a Tesla Cybertruck on the South Portico of the White House. (Mandel Ngan / AFP)

IT’S BEEN A TOUGH FEW WEEKS FOR Elon Musk and his business empire.

Tesla shares have plummeted as the electric-vehicle company is increasingly seen as a symbol of Trumpism, with consumers in both the United States and Europe walking away from the brand. And it could soon get worse, with Democrats and their allies now trying to leverage major funds against Tesla and not just individual purchasers.

On Tuesday, a group of Democratic New York state senators sent a letter urging the New York state comptroller to divest the state pension fund’s position in Tesla amid the company’s stock volatility. And last month Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, sent a letter to some of the union’s biggest asset managers asking them to review Tesla’s current valuation.

“We don’t want the retirees to be holding the bag,” Weingarten told me. “Here you have us being really concerned about retirement security and about pensions, and a lot of it triggered because Tesla holdings are a big piece of a lot of retirement systems.”

Weingarten stressed that this was purely about protecting union members’ retirement funds, not about politics. But it’s hard to read it that way. The #TeslaTakedown movement has taken off among critics of the administration who view it as one of the only effective ways to make the president and his copilot feel a modicum of pain for the policies they’ve pushed.

“We need to make sure our pension fund is stellar and represents good corporate governance,” New York state Senator Patricia Fahy, who spearheaded the letter to the comptroller, told The Bulwark in a phone interview. “But also, the goal is to bring attention to somebody who I think is raising a lot of concerns, the CEO Elon Musk, on a whole host of issues at the federal level.”

The #TeslaTakedown movement began organically, when Boston University professor Joan Donovan posted a digital flyer to her Bluesky account in February encouraging her followers to protest Tesla. It soon spread. Around the country, protests are now popping up at Tesla dealerships and storefronts from Boston to Burbank. Some Tesla owners have vowed to trade in their cars, including Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, who told reporters on Tuesday that it was hard for him to ride in one anymore, following Musk’s recent clash with him. (Kelly also said the car was “a little janky” and “cheaply built on the inside.”) Others have put bumper stickers on their Teslas clarifying that the car is not an expression of support for the billionaire; or that they made the purchase before he went “crazy.”

“The insanity of the entire situation is that Musk depends on Democratic voters and blue states and progressive policies for his wealth,” president of the Center for American Progress Neera Tanden said in an interview with The Bulwark.

“The question for Democrats is: How much longer are you going to fund this person who attacks you, attacks what you believe in, and funds Donald Trump?” Tanden continued, arguing that blue states should reevaluate any tax subsidies for Tesla.

Business boycotts have long been a feature of political warfare, with Democrats having gone after Fox News advertisers and corporations who supported election denialists and conservatives having targeted companies they deemed woke. But never before has the business at the center of the controversy been run concurrently by the top White House official.

Then again, never have we had such a top White House official.

Musk’s burn-it-down approach to the federal government has quickly turned him from an eccentric billionaire with somewhat heterodox politics to a MAGA diehard and bête noire of liberals. Efforts to stop him and DOGE have had some successes in the courts. But the attempt to fully dislodge him from the seat of government has been channeled through the Tesla protests.

They’ve certainly got his attention. Between March 6 and midday Wednesday, Musk had posted more than 60 tweets, replies, and retweets on his X account related to the Tesla boycotts, according to a Bulwark review. On Tuesday, he joined Trump for what amounted to a 45-minute Tesla infomercial on the White House driveway.

And while some GOP lawmakers have resisted publicly embracing Musk’s electric vehicle—Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, for example, told HuffPost he prefers “vehicles with internal combustion engines that burn fuels that we have in the United States”—other conservative figures have responded by proclaiming their allegiance to the company. Fox News host Sean Hannity said on Monday he does not “believe in cancel culture” and that he planned to buy a Tesla S Plaid in solidarity with Musk. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones also shared a photo of the “incredible customized Cyber Truck” he purchased in response to the “targeting” of “Elon Musk and Tesla.”

The purchases are just one component of the backlash to the backlash. Trump also declared that vandalism at Tesla factories and charging stations (and there have been some) would now be considered acts of domestic terrorism. And Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the chair of the House DOGE Subcommittee, sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel requesting they prioritize investigations into the attacks on Tesla property and provide the committee with additional information about their nature and background.

The question now facing the Democratic leadership is how much they should support the #TeslaTakedown movement. Publicly, there has been some reluctance to jump too firmly on board, for fear that doing so would detract from the organic nature of the movement. Privately, party members have been pleased to see the fallout. Some have marveled at the spectacle of conservatives rushing to purchase environmentally conscious vehicles strictly as a matter of tribalism.

“Our secret plan to have Trump supporters buy electric cars and save the planet is proceeding as I have foreseen,” former New Jersey Rep. Tom Malinowski joked.

Others believe that Musk and Trump’s Tesla boosterism is an implicit admission that they’re concerned about the social backlash the boycott movement is channeling.

Yet it remains to be seen how successful the #TeslaTakedown movement will be. It’s not clear how tanking Tesla’s stock will force Musk out of government. Trump, for one, is not inclined to appear as if he’s bending to political pressure. In fact, it is likely that he will hug Musk even closer. And his commitment to labeling those who vandalize Tesla dealerships and property as domestic terrorists could also have a chilling effect.

“Musk is the weak link in this MAGA chain. He is really quite unpopular,” said Ezra Levin, cofounder of Indivisible, one of the grassroots groups that has been helping organize demonstrations at Tesla dealerships. “The end game really is getting Republicans to break from Musk. That’s what I would like to see happen. I would like to see more Republicans come out and say, ‘You know what, DOGE, bad idea, poorly implemented, we should stop this.’”

If there is a template for Democrats to follow, it could well be the 1980 divestment movement targeting the apartheid regime in Musk’s native South Africa. Some who participated in that effort see parallels. Patrick Gaspard, who was involved in the anti-apartheid movement as a young activist and served as ambassador to South Africa in the Obama administration, told The Bulwark that Tesla’s status in coastal America gave liberals leverage.

“[Tesla] was climate movement–adjacent; liberals were comfortable with it; for trustees of pension funds interested in taking advantage of modern social movements, Tesla was an easy lift. The anti-Tesla movement is about undoing that,” he said, comparing it to the second half of the anti-apartheid movement in the late 1980s when there were specific bans against companies like Kodak.

But Gaspard said that unlike today, the anti-apartheid movement had the support of lawmakers like Mitch McConnell.

“For Tesla stockholders, the price of their shares going down is a point of accountability,” he said. “For Republican House and Senate members, if they see some precipitous decline in their approval that can be tied directly to Elon Musk firing vets, boom, that’s the point at which they have some credible exit path.”

“But we’re not there for some time. It’s going to take a while for them to appreciate that this is about Elon Musk.”

–Sam Stein contributed reporting.

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🫏 Donkey Business:

— New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen announced her retirement on Wednesday. It will be interesting to see how many other older Democratic lawmakers (Shaheen is 78 and has held the seat since 2008) will read the room this midterm cycle and attempt to pass the torch to a younger generation of leaders that the party is so clearly craving. Michigan Sen. Gary Peters and Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith, who are 66 and 67 years old respectively, have already announced they will not seek re-election in 2026.

— In other Granite State news, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is headed to New Hampshire next month to headline the state party’s annual McIntyre-Shaheen 100 fundraising dinner. WMUR reports that it will be the first visit to the early primary state from a potential 2028 presidential contender (Ro, step up your game, man).

— Sen. Bernie Senders has been drawing sizable crowds at his “stop oligarchy” tour. The Associated Press’s Steve Peoples writes that 4,000 people showed up to his event on Friday night in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another 2,600 attended his event the next day in Altoona, Wisconsin (not bad turnout for a town of fewer than 10,000 residents). Sanders appears to be one of the few leaders on the left who is taking an aggressive offense approach to the Trump administration. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told Peoples that she plans to join Sanders on the road soon.

My open tabs:

— Politico’s Jonathan Martin has officially kicked off the stream of stories speculating about potential presidential runs, with this story about Rahm Emanuel’s future.

— I found this article by Michael Baharaeen to be a thoughtful analysis of why Democrats seem to be struggling so much on trans issues. This newsletter from JVL on trans people is also very much worth your time.

— I have a new appreciation for how much work goes into the New York Times crossword after reading this by New York magazine’s Matthew Schneier.