About 10 protesters gathered across the street from a Tesla showroom in Austin, Texas, after noon on March 29 to criticize the company’s CEO.
The demonstration along a stretch of North Highway 183 was one of hundreds organized across the United States on March 29, as part of the nationwide “Tesla Takedown” protest. The action takes aim at Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who, along with leading a range of business ventures, is also a senior adviser to President Donald Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency.
Organizing the nationwide protest of Musk and DOGE, a nonprofit that supports left-progressive causes called the “Action Network” published an interactive map online, sharing protest times and locations. The Action Network website states, “Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it.”
The technologist recently purchased a $35 million property in Austin, a deep blue enclave of Travis County, for his family.
While the Austin event was relatively calm, the protest came just days after incendiary devices were found at the same location; part of a pattern of escalating violence against the electric car company.
A police cruiser was parked in the showroom lot. Inside, staff declined to comment to The Epoch Times, directing all questions to Tesla’s press team.
“Incel,” an anti-Tesla protester, shouted back as the car drove away.
Michael Casey, who was among the pro-Tesla counter-protesters, questioned the rhetoric he was hearing from those across the street who opposed Tesla and Musk. He also expressed dismay at the pattern of destruction directed at Tesla dealerships and automobiles.
“How are you going to get me to come to the other side by just wanting me to hate all the time?” he asked.
The Austin anti-Tesla protesters declined to comment on the record. As they held their signs, many cars drove by and honked their horns—often, though not always, in support of the anti-Tesla protesters.
Nationwide Protest Brings Out Many Sides
A “Tesla Takedown” event in Gainesville, Florida, drew much larger crowds than the one in Austin.
For a Democrat-controlled university town in a Republican-led state, the Gainesville protest event was about equally split. About 200 people, expressing support for Musk, Tesla, and Trump lined the sidewalk in front of the local electric vehicle dealership, while about the same number stood on the opposite side of the busy four-lane thoroughfare voicing their opposition.
“The people on the other side don’t care about democracy, but we do,” said Jay Willard, who stood among the protesters opposed to Musk.
“Take whatever is said by Trump and his minions, turn it upside-down, and you’ll have the truth,” Pellett said. “We’ve got a felon and a billionaire literally buying elections” and “tanking the economy.”
Some on the anti-Tesla side also held up signs equating Musk with Nazism and fascism.
Tyler Scaglione, 18, who joined the counter-protesters supporting Musk and Tesla said, “I’m surprised by some of that, some of the Nazi stuff, because I think to compare anything to that is a little shameful.”
In one hand, Scaglione waved a small American flag, and in the other, a sign calling Democrats “hypocrites.”
