“I bought this before Elon went crazy”: How Tesla owners are fighting back after funding Musk’s MAGA push | Opinion

“Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is stepping away from his roles on two of Donald Trump’s advisory councils following the president’s decision to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

“Musk announced the news in a Twitter post [a few years before buying Twitter and] after the president’s statement at the White House.

“[I] Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” Musk wrote.

He had been a member of Trump’s Manufacturing Jobs Initiative and the Strategic and Policy Forum.

I know that time is a flat circle and that our collective memory hole is now approaching the size and pull of a black hole, but the above genuinely happened in 2017, the last time Tesla’s fearless leader and hair plugs innovator Elon Musk got into bed with a dangerous fascist.

Yep, that’s back when former Democrat voter and fund raiser Musk was telling the world the he cared about its environment and that one of his heartfelt goals in building Tesla’s hegemony was to usher in “a sustainable energy Earth”.

What you can read about him today, of course, is that he’s so far in bed with Donald Trump that he’s probably getting nappy rash from the 78-year-old Global Boss’s incontinence pants.

Musk has been jumping up and down on stage like a kind of comic throwback to the Revenge of the Nerds movies and cheering as Trump commits to pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement again, and promising to “drill baby drill” as much oil and gas as possible because climate change is, in his cheeseburger-soaked brain, “a hoax”.

Say it again, Elon: “Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

So, what changed? Absolutely nothing. Musk has always been out for himself first and foremost, and, having written a lot about Elon, I’m genuinely inclined to believe that his end game is to become the first genius to live on Mars.

That’s speculation, of course, but what is clear is that he’s decided he needs more power. That he, as the smartest person alive, should be running America, and the world, and that, because he was born in South Africa, and thus can’t be President, the best he can do is become the Puppet Master.

And so he threw what for him is a relatively tiny amount of money – $US250 million – at getting Trump elected, and turned his X platform into a giant propaganda machine for MAGA. Honestly, there are too many examples of him turning himself inside out against his former beliefs to do this for me to list, but what I like to ponder, in my crueller moments, is just how much he hates actually hanging out with, and attempting to explain things to, Donald Trump.

Still, the pay off can be measured in billions for his businesses, but where does it leave his fans, and those who’ve bought his cars and believed his bullshit and now realise that he’s not at all the saviour fair they thought?

Buying bumper stickers, basically. And I must admit, I really wish I’d been as smart as Hawaii resident Matthew Hiller, who has a shop on Etsy called Mad Puffer Stickers that has now made him a handy sum by selling to Tesla owners who assuage their guilt by slapping a sticker saying “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy” on their cars.

According to The New York Times, Hiller originally sold stickers with fish illustrations (like an image of a clownfish with the caption “Don’t talk to me. I’m a fishtrovert”) on Etsy. He was considering buying a Tesla, but in early 2023, several months after Musk completed his takeover of Twitter, he found himself alienated by what he characterised as misinformation on the site.

“So I’m like, there’s no way I’m buying a Tesla: I don’t want to give this guy a penny,” he said. “Then I started thinking, there’s got to be so many people who are just embarrassed, who have a Tesla already, and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, now I’m repping this guy. I don’t want to endorse anything this guy stands for.’”

Business started off slow, but once Musk threw down, and jumped up and down with Trump, orders started to flow in and he has now sold 18,000 stickers across 30 countries.

Apparently these stickers are even on cars in Australia – if you see one, send it in to us.

It is strange, and unfortunate, but not entirely unique, that a man like Musk is so closely linked to the brand he sells. Steve Jobs was similarly synonymous with Apple, but while he wasn’t the nicest human being on the planet, his favourability ratings didn’t seem to affect sales.