“Don’t buy a Swasticar” —this is what’s written on the stickers with which the activist group Everyone Hates Elon has labeled Tesla cars on the streets of London. The action is part of The People vs Elon campaign, which has already raised over £50,000 in support of anti-racist and anti-fascist initiatives.

Elsewhere, the reaction has been even more direct. In Portland, Oregon—a city famous not only for Nike but also as one of the most important hubs of counterculture and dissent in the United States—someone spray-painted “NAZI” on Tesla cars. In Salem, also in Oregon, tensions escalated further: a Tesla dealership was targeted with gunfire and set on fire. Similar incidents have occurred in other parts of the U.S., from Colorado to California.  

In other parts of the world, Tesla cars are often scratched with keys, and dealerships have been attacked with graffiti like “No Nazi.” Some Tesla owners themselves are distancing themselves from the brand with stickers reading, “When I bought this car, Elon was still normal” or “I bought it before Elon went crazy.”

The first major symbolic episode of this hostility was the attack on Tesla’s Gigafactory in Berlin, where the phrase “Heil Tesla” appeared on the building’s facade. A year earlier, the same factory had been hit by an arson attack. However, the recent escalation of hate seems to have a key date: January 20. During the inauguration that returned Donald Trump to the White House, Elon Musk greeted the crowd with a gesture that was interpreted worldwide as a double “Heil Hitler.” He tried to justify it as a simple “My heart goes to you,” but the incident fed into a growing perception of his alignment with far-right extremism. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote, “we must be careful about what we pretend to be,” and in Musk’s case, his global image has rapidly turned into a meme of epic proportions.

Elon Musk, often mistaken for an inventor (which he is not), built his career as an entrepreneur with companies like Hyperloop, The Boring Company, X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX, xAI, and even PayPal. But the name most associated with him is Tesla. Founded in 2003, Musk joined in 2004 with a $6.5 million investment, becoming CEO in 2008—the same year the first, legendary Roadster was launched. Two years later, Tesla went public on the Nasdaq.

Something has definitely flipped. Tesla, the brand that once didn’t need advertising, has become the Antichrist. And this is happening just as Chinese electric cars are becoming more competitive than ever. To seal this shift in perception, one of the most striking images circulating online today is from Portuguese illustrator Zez Vaz: a redesigned version of the famous Tiananmen Square photo, where the lone man standing in front of tanks has been replaced with a row of Cybertrucks. The message is clear: Tesla, once a symbol of the future, has become the emblem of an oppressive power crushing dissent.

In the days following Musk’s gesture on Inauguration Day, memes began circulating online, distorting the Tesla Model S name into “Model SS”—a clear reference to the infamous Nazi Schutzstaffel. Paradoxically, the Third Reich produced one of the longest-lasting cars in history, the Volkswagen Beetle, and within Nazism, environmentalism was intertwined with racist ideology—Hitler, for example, was a vegetarian.

Something has definitely flipped. Tesla, the brand that once didn’t need advertising, has become the Antichrist. And this is happening just as Chinese electric cars are becoming more competitive than ever. To seal this shift in perception, one of the most striking images circulating online today is from Portuguese illustrator Zez Vaz: a redesigned version of the famous Tiananmen Square photo, where the lone man standing in front of tanks has been replaced with a row of Cybertrucks. The message is clear: Tesla, once a symbol of the future, has become the emblem of an oppressive power crushing dissent.

The myth of Tesla as the car of optimism and progress now seems definitively buried.

Opening image: Controversial Image Of Elon Musk Displayed On Tesla Factory In Germany