The Guerrilla Marketing Campaign Against Elon Musk

Perhaps you’re an American waiting at a bus stop, in a country not your own, ruminating on the limits of democracy at home. A bus passes, and then another. You’re feeling low and, frankly, a little pissed off. (Perhaps you’re also running late. You’re always running late.) What could make you feel incrementally better? Doomscrolling, you see: federal layoffs, foreign-aid cuts, the dangers of A.I., a flurry of angry social media posts made at 3 A.M. You look closer at an advertisement on the side of the bus stop. “ELON MUSK IS A BELLEND. Signed, the UK,” it reads, using rude British slang for a male anatomical part. Aha!

This spring, as Musk has busied himself dismantling parts of the United States government, signs of discontent with the world’s richest man have stealthily appeared across London’s public-transport network. On the Tube, a fake advertisement for Tesla showed Musk doing a gesture widely received as a Nazi salute alongside the company’s plummeting stock price, with the caption “Hate Doesn’t Sell. Just Ask Tesla.” Another, plastered over a bus stop in Clerkenwell, in central London, featured Musk and Donald Trump together with a Tesla, and read “Autopilot for your car. Autocrat for your country.” On a bus stop in East London’s Bethnal Green, a sign branded Tesla “the Swasticar,” and announced that the vehicle “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 Seconds.” “Now With White Power Steering,” another read. The displays, though convincing, are not officially sanctioned. A spokesperson for Transport for London told me, in an e-mail, “These posters were not authorised by TfL nor our advertising partners and we have instructed our teams and contractors to remove any that are found on our network.”

The posters are not the only indicators of disarray: on Tuesday, after Tesla reported a profit drop of seventy-one per cent, Musk announced that he would be spending less time working with the Trump Administration. But why the hate in the United Kingdom? Outside of his work at the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk has devoted a surprising amount of time to trolling the country. In the past few months, he has made a barrage of posts meddling in the U.K.’s affairs. He has called for, variously, the incarceration of the Labour politician Jess Phillips; the incarceration of the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer; and the release of a far-right anti-immigrant crusader who goes by Tommy Robinson and had been jailed for contempt of court. (Robinson, who was banned from Twitter, in 2018, for violating its policy on “hateful content,” was reinstated after Musk bought the platform.) In January alone, Musk became fixated on a child-grooming scandal that took place in the North of England more than a decade ago; he fell out with Nigel Farage, the head of the far-right Reform U.K. party, seemingly over Farage’s refusal to support Robinson, writing that Farage “doesn’t have what it takes” to lead; and he suggested that King Charles III is now being treated at the palace on schizophrenia and doesn’t have any events scheduled should dissolve Parliament and call a U.K. general election.

Recently, Musk has turned his frenzied attention to the case of Lucy Connolly, and what he perceives as a lack of free speech in the U.K. Last October, Connolly, a white British child-care worker and mother, was sentenced to thirty-one months in prison for a post in which she called for hotels housing asylum seekers to be set on fire (Connolly is seeking to appeal). She shared it in July, after three children were fatally stabbed at a dance class in Southport. The tragedy ignited violent racial riots fueled by claims that the perpetrator was a Muslim immigrant. (He was not.) Earlier this month, Musk shared a post comparing the U.S. and the U.K.: the U.S. had “Fries,” “Airplane,” and “memes,” while the U.K. had “Chips,” “Aeroplane,” and “2 years in jail.”

Whatever one thinks of Connolly’s sentence—and it is divisive in the U.K.—Musk’s motives for interfering seem dubious. His interest in British affairs has made him broadly unpopular with the public; a full eighty per cent of Brits dislike him, according to a YouGov poll from March. He has even managed to alienate Reform voters, a majority of whom now view him unfavorably. “To start with, it’s pretty weird,” Emma, a co-founder of Everyone Hates Elon, the group behind the fake Tesla advertisements, told me recently. “He’s a South African. He lives in America. Why is he putting fingers in our pie?” Emma is in her early thirties and lives in South London. Everyone Hates Elon grew out of a ranty group chat that she had with two friends. (Members spoke to me on the condition of anonymity. Names have been changed.) They would message about the news, and then they started to exchange “random ideas to troll Elon Musk.”

Their first plan was to create a crowdfund to which people could pledge to donate one pence each time Musk posted on X, “with the money going to causes he hates,” Jason, another co-founder, told me. (Musk typically posts thousands of times per month. The group is on track to raise about a hundred and fifty thousand pounds by the end of the year.) “We just had this idea to turn the hate he spews on his platform against him, and turn it into something positive,” he said. They printed and distributed stickers that read “Don’t Buy a Swasticar.” A couple of weeks later, they made a life-size cutout of Musk doing the salute-like gesture and attempted to install it in a Tesla showroom in North London. A video on Instagram shows Emma speaking with a sales representative. “Musk wants us to show the true colors of Tesla so we thought, you know, we’d do a bit of a revamp,” she says, deadpan, pretending to be from corporate. The video went viral. Later, Jason went to another showroom with custom air fresheners for the cars—“Musk B-Gone”; “Covers the stench of fascism”—and was swiftly escorted out.

Last week, Everyone Hates Elon pulled off their biggest stunt yet. A private donor helped them secure a Tesla, then they set up an outdoor “rage room” and invited people to smash it. Around a hundred people showed up to participate. Each visitor was given around thirty seconds, a hardhat, and a sledgehammer. (They removed and recycled the car’s combustible battery first.) “I would never normally do something like this … but I’ve always wanted to smash a car,” a man named Giles Pearson told the Guardian. The remains of the Tesla will be crushed and auctioned to raise money for food banks. “It was super cathartic, and it felt amazing to be there venting our frustration,” Jason told me. (Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.) “What we try to do is channel our anger into some kind of creativity,” Emma said. “We want to make our activism in this stuff quite creative and appeal to lots of people.”

Not long ago, I met up with Emma and Jason on a windy day near Waterloo station, where they had planned to install a fake bus ad. Emma had on a high-visibility vest over a short puffer jacket and was carrying a cardboard tube. “High-vis is essential,” she told me, putting up her hood. Jason agreed. “You put the high-vis on and people don’t really tend to question what you’re doing,” he said. They walked quickly toward a stop outside St. Thomas’ Hospital. For a few minutes, they attempted to open a case containing a stroller ad on the side of the bus stand. Locked. A bus passed; the driver looked at them without expression. They tried another one across the street. Open! Jason filmed while Emma unfurled an oversized poster and secured it inside the case. A man standing nearby holding a sandwich and a Coke stared at them. The ad was styled like an informational flyer one might see at a doctor’s office. “KNOW YOUR PARASITES,” it read, listing “Ticks,” “Worms,” and “Billionaires,” alongside images of Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos. “Remove with wealth tax,” the poster advised. “Immediate intervention is crucial for your health, and the health of our communities.”

Afterward, they jumped in an Uber and headed to a pub in Kennington, where they ordered plant-based burgers. Jason was already editing the footage for an Instagram post. Before founding Everyone Hates Elon, both he and Emma had worked on campaigns for progressive nonprofits, and they often found themselves stymied, stylistically. “It can be frustrating that organizations tend to do things in the same way, where there’s not any humor in what they’re saying,” Jason said. “They kind of talk in this impenetrable way that doesn’t reach anyone who doesn’t agree with it already.” He was drinking a non-alcoholic beer. He showed Emma a draft of the post, and she suggested he tweak the settings. “When you’re faced with threats from people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and how aggressive they are with their messaging, I don’t think the same old approach really works,” he said.

“One of our frustrations is how quickly messages of the far right and the right spread,” Emma said. “Something as simple as ‘Make America Great Again’ or, like, Elon Musk’s tweets and memes, they spread so, so quickly. You can criticize them all you want, but actually they’re quite good at messaging.” She went on, “Often those progressive messages are just rubbish. They don’t reach enough people. It’s all, like, ‘Let’s love each other,’ or it’s really politically heavy.” With Everyone Hates Elon, they wanted funny messages that people could remember and repeat. “If all we can do is get people repeating ‘Elon Musk is a bellend,’ or ‘We should have a wealth tax,’ then there are two things we’re happy with, I reckon,” she said.

One appeal of the group’s messaging is its peculiarly British sensibility; the statements tend to cut through the noise. “I know everyone thinks we’re polite but, like, we call a bellend a bellend,” Emma said. (The term is roughly equivalent to “dickhead.”) “We can see someone like Elon Musk, and even Jeff Bezos, and other people, and it’s, like, they’re a bellend. They’re not cool, they think they’re cool. We don’t have time for it. Hopefully, this is something we can do to galvanize the U.K., and the rest of Europe, to say, ‘We don’t have to just sit here, we can actually say it how we see it.’ ”

Jason posted the video to the group’s Instagram and TikTok. In the following days, it went viral, drawing more than three million views. “He’s the richest private citizen in the world,” Jason said, before leaving. “We can’t outspend him. We don’t own Twitter. We can’t outcompete in that sense, but we know that we’re funnier than him. He’s definitely not funny.”

REUTERS