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I’M A VETERAN OF ORGANIZED AUTO BOYCOTTS. MY ADVICE TO TESLA? DUMP
MUSK  
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Ron Carver
July 3, 2025
Common Dreams
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_ During the Great Recession, I organized a Toyota boycott that
accidentally paved the way for Musk’s rise. Musk probably won’t
tell that story, so I will. _

,

 

Elon Musk's alliance with Donald Trump
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but the Tesla brand has yet to recover from Musk's high profile foray
into far-right politics.

Tesla stock has plummeted precipitously ever since Musk’s embrace of
Donald Trump last year. It’s been enough to alarm board members, who
are now considering replacing Musk as CEO
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public “Tesla Takedown” protests have spread across the country.

Ironically, Musk himself was the beneficiary of a similar boycott
years ago — a boycott I ran. And since Musk himself is unlikely to
relay the story, I will.

In the aftermath of the 2008 market collapse, Toyota announced plans
to shutter its Fremont, California factory and move production to
Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Mississippi. Not surprisingly, outrage
ensued. Soon after, I received a call from the incoming United Auto
Workers president Bob King, who asked me to devise a campaign to
challenge the Toyota closing.

For Toyota, it was about abandoning California. For Musk, it’s been
about dismantling our government and attacking union rights, among
other misdeeds.

The strategy we landed on was to reframe this struggle from one borne
by workers alone to one that emphasized the broader damage to
California’s economy that the closure would cause.

Back then in California, one of every four
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sold was a Toyota. As the _New York Times’ _Bob Herbert wrote in
2010 [[link removed]], the
U.S. was “the largest market for Toyota vehicles in the world,
larger even than Japan.” And the Corolla, built at the Fremont
facility, was “the best-selling car of all time.”

But it was that very success that made them vulnerable.

We knew Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were the prime sales days for
most car dealerships. We dispatched our ground troops
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cover those three days of the week, in shifts of 8 to 10 people, to 50
dealerships in California and 50 more throughout the United states,
holding banners proclaiming, “Toyota Kills California Jobs
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The company’s sales managers panicked, with several complaining to
me personally that their sales were hurting. On April 1, 2010, Toyota
shuttered the Fremont factory as they had previously announced, but
our boycott continued.

Two weeks later, faced with our ongoing boycott, Toyota president Akio
Toyoda, the grandson of the company's founder, called Elon Musk
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meet Musk for dinner, and offered a $50 million cash infusion if Musk
would take over the old Fremont plant
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hire from the laid off workforce.

Musk had been on the brink of signing a deal to open a Tesla plant
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Southern California, but this offer — and the boycott that prompted
it — abruptly changed his plans.

Not long after, those Fremont workers were making Teslas instead of
Toyotas — and employment at the plant has skyrocketed from 4,700
then
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20,000 today [[link removed]].
Musk went on to become the world’s wealthiest man.

Now, Toyota president Akio Toyoda wasn’t exactly like today’s Musk
when it comes to public notoriety. But there are some striking
similarities between the two cases.

Both car companies claim to be leaders of environmentally sustainable
transportation. Like the Prius before it, a drive through any upscale
retail parking lot from Los Angeles to New York City today will
similarly show a high proportion of Tesla sedans, bought during less
fraught times by environmentally conscious consumers.

And both companies have suffered from a strong sense of betrayal among
their most loyal customer base. For Toyota, it was about abandoning
California. For Musk, it’s been about dismantling our government and
attacking union rights, among other misdeeds.

Today, the cratering of Tesla’s stock value, coinciding with
nationwide anti-Musk protests at Tesla dealerships, reinforces two
important truisms fundamental to a free market: public opinion of
brands still affects stock value, and a CEO's behavior can trigger
lasting backlash against their brand.

So as the organizer of the boycott that accidentally helped along
Musk’s rise to prominence, what’s my advice for the Tesla board
today? Make Musk divest his shares and move on.

It’s likely that nothing else will quell these protests.

_Ron Carver, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies,
was a special assistant to UAW President Bob King in 2010._

_Common Dreams is a reader-supported independent news outlet created
in 1997 as a new media model. Our nonprofit newsroom covers the most
important news stories of the moment. Common Dreams free online
journalism keeps our millions of readers well-informed, inspired, and
engaged._

* Telsa
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* Elon Musk
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* boycotts
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