What do you do when the richest man in the world buys his way into the government and starts using that role to hurt people?
For a growing number of protesters around the world, you push back where he’ll notice: his business. In fact, that’s putting it too lightly. As one organizer, Edward Niedermeyer, put it: “The goal, I would say, is to bankrupt Elon Musk — bring down his empire.”
Musk might not be nearing bankruptcy, and the exact efficacy of the protests is hard to measure, but Tesla is becoming more vulnerable. Tesla stocks have plummeted, sales are bottoming out, and Tesla owners are trying, unsuccessfully due to lack of interest, to ditch their vehicles. Unsurprisingly, a bizarre free advertisement from the president at the White House hasn’t been enough to save the brand.
Dubbed the “Tesla Takedown,” organizers insist the movement is decentralized and peaceful. Signs at rallies across the U.S. include messages like “Nobody Elected Elon!” and “Boycott Tesla!” as well as some more pointed sentiments, like “No Nazis.” And the movement has gone global. Across the border in Kitchener, Ontario, one protester held a sign that said “Keep Canada Strong and Free,” a reference to the Trump administration’s insistence that Canada ought to become the 51st U.S. state. Across the Atlantic, in the UK, Portugal, and elsewhere in Europe, protests have also started to form. These kinds of confrontational protests — even nonviolent ones — sometimes make Christians nervous. Didn’t Jesus tell us to love our enemies, after all (Matthew 5:43-48)?
But what if the Tesla Takedown protests are an act of love for Elon Musk, even if neither organizers nor Musk see it that way?
The Dehumanization of Oppression
Jesus’ commandment to love our enemies is sometimes mistaken as a commandment to not have enemies. On the contrary, we can only love our enemies by knowing who our enemies are. For those who care about access to Medicare and Medicaid, keeping drinking water safe, or how students are progressing in their education, Musk has chosen to make himself an enemy through sweeping and arbitrary cuts to essential government spending on these and many other issues, with devastating impacts.
In a situation like this, loving Musk isn’t a matter of wishing him well or trying not to be mad at him. To love an enemy like Musk would require taking away his ability to abuse others. That is exactly what the Tesla Takedowns are aiming to accomplish.
In his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Brazilian Christian Paulo Freire explains that while it might seem strange to say, it is “precisely in the response of the oppressed to the violence of their oppressors that a gesture of love may be found.” Oppression, Freire famously argued, is a process of dehumanization, of denying and suppressing the humanity of the oppressed. Yet on the opposite side of the relationship of domination, Freire argues, “as the oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized.”
We know what it means to dehumanize others in order to oppress them. You would have to dehumanize millions of people around the world who receive lifesaving healthcare or basic resources from USAID funding to cancel 83% of its programming, for example. Projecting total power over others, especially vulnerable others, is the apparent strategy of the Trump administration, and Musk has embraced it with enthusiasm. Such a strategy obviously brutalizes poor and working people the most. If this isn’t dehumanization, what is?
But as Freire points out, oppression also corrupts the oppressors, as is evident in Musk’s embarrassingly desperate bids for attention.
For a person who claims to be concerned with efficiency, Musk posts about 100 times a day on X, the social media platform he owns, which artificially inflates the reach of his own content. He wants to be perceived as being among the best players in the world of the video game Diablo IV, a game that requires an immense amount of time (a fact I can personally confirm, as shameful as it is during Lent). But players have raised suspicions that he’s likely paying others to play for him. As commentators have noted for years before Musk hitched his fate so closely to the Trump administration, he often exhibits a desperation for validation. He wants to be seen as a person who’s funny and familiar with internet culture, but his jokes often fall flat.
Yet Musk’s alienation isn’t only from others, but also from himself. Musk revealed the extent of how his conscience has been warped in a recent interview with Joe Rogan, where he argued that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,” something he described as a “bug” in Western programming.
Empathy and Liberation
My partner Emily sometimes asks me if I think billionaires are happy. I think a lot of them are, and so much the worse for us. She always counters by saying they aren’t really happy, because you can’t really be happy, in an authentic way, in a way that counts, if you’re so far removed from people’s real lives and if your own life depends on exploiting others. Emily has the bug of empathy. When it comes to rich people, I guess I just simply don’t.
It’s hard for me to cultivate empathy for someone like Musk, who is using all his capacities to ruin — truly ruin — the lives of millions of people on purpose. Given his position of power, his bids for attention don’t elicit pity from me, but a kind of repulsion. Friedrich Nietzsche was onto something when he described the world as one ruled by remarkably weak and unhealthy people, lording power over those who don’t require the recognition of sycophants to feel strong in themselves. Musk is a person who is being eaten alive by his own resentment in real time, and if I’m being frank, I do see it as a kind of perverse consolation that he seems so visibly unhappy, unlike other billionaires who are either happy themselves or at least hide their peculiar kind of sadness. Maybe I’m being eaten alive by my own resentment in various ways.
If we really want to cultivate empathy for Musk, though, for our own humanity’s sake if nothing else, we can’t stop at finding pity or private feelings, even if those are important. Since Musk’s positions of power are damaging him too, a truly empathetic response would be to do whatever we can to remove him from those positions.
To the oppressor, liberation doesn’t feel like love or empathy. In an interview with Sean Hannity, Musk expressed “shock” at the backlash against Tesla, arguing that people on the Left “basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we’re stopping the terrible waste and corruption in the government,” adding, “I’ve never done anything harmful.”
In fact, real people, including a 10-year-old boy Peter Donde in South Sudan, have already died as direct consequences of Musk’s actions. The blood is on his hands. Musk’s insulated position of power has numbed his ability to think, judge, and simply live alongside others with any sense of care. To be trapped in such a prison, even of one’s own making, is still to be trapped. And being released, even if it doesn’t feel like a release, would still be a release.
The Tesla Takedowns are not limited to liberation for the oppressed; they’re part of the key to Musk’s liberation too. Freire put it well: “As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressors the humanity they had lost in the exercise of oppression.”
May we all be liberated from such a dehumanizing system of oppression. You can start at your nearest Tesla showroom.
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