About 30 New Yorkers gathered on Sunday afternoon outside of the Tesla showroom at 860 Washington St. in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District to rage against Elon Musk and his meddling in the U.S. government.
Organized by the direct action group Rise and Resist, the Feb. 9 protest focused on Musk, Tesla’s CEO and the world’s wealthiest person, who now serves as head of the Trump-appointed Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been attracting controversy over Musk’s tactics to reshape the federal government bureaucracy and budget. That includes disintegrating USAID foreign aid programs and accessing sensitive information in the Treasury Department.
While Musk is technically an adviser to President Trump, others believe his intervention in government policies since Trump took office on Jan. 20 is tantamount to a hostile takeover.
“This is an administrative coup,” said Jamie Bauer, one of the protest’s organizers, during the protest. “We were upset with Musk taking over the government. What better place than to go to his showroom?”
Another protestor, Ryan Toale, a retiree who lives near Union Square also called Musk’s actions a coup.
“This is about outrage about someone who was not elected wielding so much power,” he said. “He’s destroying something that took 250 years to build. It has problems but there’s other ways to fix it, not by a coup.”
The decision to protest outside Tesla’s showroom was more geared towards Musk than the whole company itself. Kevin Fitz from Brooklyn explained that the showroom employees were not the target.
“Musk doesn’t own the entire company,” Fitz said, referring to several institutional and individual stakeholders, including Vanguard Group, Blackrock, and Musk’s younger brother, Kimbal. “He’s just synonymous with it. They’re calm and collected inside and [I] hope it continues. They’re not the target of our ire; they just work for Tesla.”
The protest began at 1 p.m. on Feb. 9 and lasted an hour. Everyone protesting held signs with some reading, “Pull the Plug on Musk” or “No Dictators in the USA.” One man held the U.S. flag upside down, a symbol of distress.
Written in chalk on the sidewalk were slogans reading “Boycott Tesla” and “Tesla Home of Swasticar” — an apparent reference to Musk flashing the Nazi salute an an inaugural event on Jan. 20 in Washington, DC.
Bauer explained that part of the protest was to encourage others not to buy anything from Tesla.
“We want Tesla to be boycotted,” they said. “There are other EVs out there that are safer.”
Some passerby either glanced at the protestors or watched them as they walked by. A handful were spotted with their phones out. One woman driving by beeped her horn in support.
At the start of the second half-hour, the protestors decided to go into the showroom. Nearly all 30 of them entered and marched around the room, holding up their signs and chanting their slogans. The employees stayed in the back with a wire roping off their section from the showroom. Two were making phone calls while watching the protestors carefully.
No damage was done to the cars on display, though some left their signs on the hoods or trunks before marching out.
A few minutes later, six police officers showed up and began circling the group of protestors. The showroom employees were seen examining the cars before locking their doors and grabbing all the signs left behind. No one was arrested or reprimanded.
The protest ended at 2 p.m. Bauer indicated that there would be another protest in the near future, and other protestors seemed eager to continue rallying against Musk.
One noticeable aspect of the protestors is that they were of an older generation, a number of whom were retirees. When asked why this was, Bauer and others had different explanations.
“You don’t fight coups on social media,” Bauer says.
“We older people are from the 60s, 70s, and 80s,” says Fitz, referring to the many protests during those decades. “Younger generations have been told nothing they do matters.”
One retiree, Ernie Chirico from Staten Island, seemed aghast as he talked about what Musk was doing with DOGE. Although he noted that young New Yorkers have been to pro-Palestinian rallies and Saturday’s rally in support of transgender youth, Chirico was concerned about younger generations not protesting enough against Musk and the rest of the Trump administration.
“It’s scary when kids don’t know,” he says. “It’s going to get worse before they care.”
amNewYork Metro called the showroom for a comment and was told the employees could not do so. amNewYork Metro also reached out to Tesla’s press office, and is awaiting a response.
