It appears Elon Musk has enemies all over the world.
The tech billionaire — currently the planet’s richest man and CEO of Tesla — has integrated himself into U.S. politics, becoming Donald Trump‘s head of a new Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) and aligned himself with far-right politicians in Europe.
In Bethnal Green in East London, a poster has now emerged at a bus stop garnering significant online attention. “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds,” the image says, with a picture of Musk in a Tesla below.
The photo is taken from the moment Musk, also the founder of SpaceX, made what looked like a Nazi salute at Trump’s January inauguration rally, drawing criticisms from all over the globe. The poster dubs Tesla “The Swasticar.”
Behind the poster seems to be a U.K.-based group calling itself Everyone Hates Elon. “Elon Musk just helped the far-right in [Germany] win their best result since WW2,” the group wrote alongside a TikTok of a man in high-vis clothes putting the sign up. That comment was a reference to the 20.8 percent share of the vote for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the recent election, “So don’t buy his f*king cars, yeah?” the group concluded. The TikTok video has more garnered more than 980,000 likes and nine million views.
Everyone Hates Elon group has a GoFundMe page where proceeds can go to the costs of campaigning against the mogul. Its statement on the fundraiser reads: “Not happy with fueling the far-right in the USA, Elon Musk is now doing the same in Europe. We can’t let the richest man in the world poison our politics. While nurses use food banks, his wealth grew by $200 billion last year.”
It continues: “We’ve plastered ‘don’t buy a swasticar’ stickers across hundreds of Teslas in London and taken a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk to a Tesla dealership…” They have so far raised over £4,300 ($5,400).
Meanwhile; Tesla sales have almost halved in Europe in January amid Musk’s work for Trump, his support for Germany’s AfD party and his barrage of social media attacks on the continent’s top politicians and left-wing groups. The carmaker sold 9,945 vehicles in Europe in January, down 45 percent from 18,161 in January 2024, according to data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA) published on Wednesday. Tesla’s share of the market dropped from 1.8 percent to 1 percent.
Musk has denied a “hostile takeover” of the U.S. government. “The people voted for major government reform and that’s what the people are going to get,” he said as he defended his cost-cutting plans from the White House on Feb. 11. “That’s what democracy is all about. I fully expect to be scrutinized,” he added. “It’s not like I think I can get away with something.”
The latest in a slew of actions includes freezing international aid programs, which research and policy NGO Guttmacher has predicted will lead to the deaths of several thousand women and children.
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