AUSTIN, Texas/GAINESVILLE, Fla./CHATTANOOGA, Tenn.—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 (DOGE).
Organizing the nationwide protest of Musk and DOGE, Action Network—a nonprofit that supports left-progressive causes—published an interactive map online, sharing protest times and locations. The Action Network website stated, “Elon Musk is destroying our democracy, and he’s using the fortune he built at Tesla to do it.”
Musk recently purchased a $35 million property in Austin, a deep blue enclave in Travis County, for his family.
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.
Standing across the street from the anti-Tesla protesters at the Austin dealership, four pro-Tesla counter-protesters held signs of their own.
One driver rolled down his car window and shouted that he was “going to buy so much Tesla stock.”
An anti-Tesla protester shouted back an insult as the car drove away.
Michael Casey, who was among the pro-Tesla counter-protesters, questioned the rhetoric that 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?” Casey 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, although 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,” Jay Willard, who stood among the protesters opposed to Musk, said.
Protester Michael Pellett expressed little sympathy toward Trump and Musk, or their supporters.
“Take whatever is said by Trump and his minions, turn it upside-down, and you’ll have the truth,” Pellett told The Epoch Times. “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.”
With one hand, Scaglione waved a small American flag, and in the other, he held a sign calling Democrats “hypocrites.”
“I’m supporting President Trump, Elon Musk, and especially the efforts of DOGE to save money for when my generation gets older, so the government and the country is still in a good place,” the college student told The Epoch Times.
Mixing in with the crowd of Musk supporters was Glenn Terry, a retired schoolteacher. Terry said he disagrees with much of what Musk is doing in his work with the federal government. Nevertheless, Terry stood sign in hand with Musk supporters, hoping to find common ground, he said.
“Our main press today is to have conversations with people that don’t agree with us politically, for the most part, and to discuss things we have in common, like clean air,” Terry told The Epoch Times.
At another point, Terry said Musk shouldn’t have so much influence in shaping the government because he wasn’t elected, and he urged for caution in efforts to downsize the government.
“A lot of people here are saying, ‘Get rid of the government. Get rid of it. Everybody’s lazy who works with the government.’ But the government does great things for us. We wouldn’t be standing by this beautiful highway if it weren’t for the government,” he said.
Helping organize the pro-Tesla counter-protest was Randi Elrad, who identified herself as a registered Democrat.
Elrad expressed dismay that a protest event would target a company such as Tesla, which employs more than 100,000 people nationwide, and whose stock is in many Americans’ retirement portfolios.
“So I said, ‘I’m going to organize a counter-protest. You are not going to protest a company because you hate the owner. That is ridiculous. I own a company, and if people hate me, I’ve got 70 employees that I feed,” she said.
Divided Over DOGE
Adding to the division, protesters on either side expressed conflicting views about how to cut government spending, as Musk and DOGE seek to do at the instruction of the president.Amy Stanley and a group of friends, who call themselves the Melrose Patriots, said they didn’t fully agree with either side at the Gainesville protest event. Standing a short distance away but on the same side as the pro-Tesla group, she held up a sign with an elephant, a donkey, and a peace sign. The elephant and donkey were crossed out.
“There’s so much propaganda being spewed from the national parties, the two parties. It keeps us divided,” Stanley said, telling The Epoch Times that she has tried to have discussions with people on both sides of the debate.
“Amazingly, if we just talk to regular people in our community that we think are on the other side, we’re going to find a lot of things that we agree about.”
She said that talking with some of the anti-Tesla protesters, she discovered one interesting commonality. “We both agreed that the government needs to be made smaller, that we need to cut fraud and waste and all of that. But how we do it, we disagreed about that,” Stanley said.
Such debates weren’t unique to the Gainesville protest event.
Standing among a group of anti-Tesla activists at a protest event about half a mile south of the Tesla dealership in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Teresa Curl expressed openness to the idea of government cuts but shared concerns about how DOGE is going about the effort.
“I think that the concept of trying to cut government spending is always a good thing. The way that it’s being done is not a good thing,” she said.
Curl raised concerns not just about DOGE but about the Trump administration more broadly.
“I think it’s going to hurt our Social Security, which I am dependent on. I think that it is hurting the rights of gay people. It’s hurting the rights of people who are trying to live here in a better country. The way that people are being deported is not humane. The attack on the Smithsonian, the attacks on our cultural arts with the Kennedy Center, the threats against Greenland, the threats against Canada ... the list goes on.”
Across the intersection from Curl, a trio of counter-protesters had gathered to show their support for Musk, DOGE, and the Trump administration. One man had staked a Trump/Vance 2024 sign into the grass and stood waving a full-sized American flag on a pole, while a woman beside him held a handful of smaller 8-by-12-inch U.S. flags on sticks.
Bill Schmidtke, the man waving the full-sized American flag, said he felt it was wrong that protesters would protest the business of an individual who was trying to help reduce wasteful spending.
Speaking with The Epoch Times, he acknowledged that many people benefit from government programs. But he warned, “The money’s not endless.”
Asked to respond to the concerns of those on the other side of the debate, Schmidtke insisted that the DOGE initiative isn’t an effort to end the government altogether. “They’re just trying to eliminate fraud and abuse,” he said.
