Above, Pat Kelley and other protesters are pictured on Lafayette Road in Portsmouth on Saturday. ARNIE ALPERT photo
By Arnie Alpert, Active with the Activists
Arnie Alpert spent decades as a community organizer/educator in NH movements for social justice and peace. Officially retired since 2020, he keeps his hands (and feet) in the activist world while writing about past and present social movements.
PORTSMOUTH—Rachel Spayd and Jennifer Almeida parked their cars near Tesla’s only New Hampshire showroom at a Portsmouth shopping plaza, took up their signs, and walked away from the showroom toward Lafayette Road. They were the first to arrive for this week’s Tesla Takedown, the local part of a nationwide protest movement against the brand associated with Elon Musk.
Musk is Tesla’s major stockholder and the main man behind X, SpaceX, and Starlink. He’s also heading up President Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which is responsible for shuttering a growing number of federal offices and laying off so many workers even Senators can’t keep count. And he’s the world’s richest man.
“I think he’s an evil person,” said Spayd, who lives in Rochester. “I think he needs to leave the White House. I’m hopeful that his company will never be able to recoup and rebound,” she said. She then proceeded to tick off grievances against Musk’s First Buddy, President Trump. An authoritarian leadership style. What’s happening to immigrants. Disrespect of the judicial system. “It’s ridiculous,” she said.
Almeida, who drove up from Chelmsford, added that Musk, who invested $288 million in Trump’s 2024 election campaign, is using his wealth to keep Republican members of Congress in line for fear of “getting primaried from the right.” Alluding to the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, which opened up the flood gates for unlimited funds in political campaigns, Almeida is concerned about the political influence of the world’s richest man, even beyond the current moment.
Lined up along Lafayette Road, more than two dozen protesters soon joined Spayd and Almeida with a variety of signs lambasting Trump and Musk. It’s not just Musk’s wealth that has people worked up. It’s his chainsaw-wielding approach to federal agencies which provide valued service to the American people. And it’s his alliance with far-right political parties like Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland.
Wearing her father’s “Air Force Veteran” cap, Pat Kelley held a sign reading “Don’t Buy Swasticar. Dump Swastistock.” Kelley, a veteran of the Coast Guard and the Merchant Marine, told me, “I think everything that Trump is doing is absolutely wrong. I think he is just taking this country down, and he’s hurting a lot of people.” Kelly, who lives in Portsmouth, said she had attended a “pop-up” (informally organized) demonstration with other veterans last week in Newmarket. Cuts to the Veterans Administration were on their minds.
“Hit Elon Where It Hurt$” was the message on Dawn Piccolo’s sign, which she had printed at a local copy center. Piccolo, who splits her time between Winchester, Massachusetts, and Old Orchard Beach, Maine, said she’s concerned about cuts to agencies like the National Institutes of Health. “I don’t understand why the Republican Party isn’t standing up,” said Piccolo, a one-time member of the GOP. “I mean, they have a job to do, and the fact that they’re ignoring the judicial system just makes me worried.”
Doing damage to the company’s reputation is the main objective of Tesla protests, and not just in the United States. It may be working. According to CNN, the high-tech car dealer’s stock value has dropped 40% since January. Musk has “personally lost $121 billion from his net worth over the past three months,” the network reported.
But it’s not just the protests which are doing damage to Musk’s fortunes, says Marie Duggan, an economist who teaches business management at Keene State College. She hadn’t thought much about Elon Musk or Tesla, she said, until she decided to use the firm as a case study for a class she taught last fall. That’s when she started looking through Tesla’s annual reports and noticed a drop in capital expenditure and increased investment in financial markets around the time the company started to turn a profit. That should be a warning sign, she said, that the company was not investing in its future.
The company’s takeoff, she said, was fueled by an Obama Administration loan made on favorable terms, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, terms favorable to the company rather than the taxpayers. As Duggan writes in an article published in the latest issue of Dollars & Sense, “President Barack Obama’s $465 million loan allowed the EV maker to transition from a novelty car company to mass production and made Musk richer than rich.” The loan was nearly five times the size of Musk’s own stake in Tesla and made the government the firm’s biggest investor by far.
Under the terms of the loan, if the company failed to pay it back, the government would get ownership shares. Of course, if the company couldn’t pay back the loan because it was failing, the shares wouldn’t be worth much. Instead, the company prospered with government support and repaid the loan. When it finally began to earn steady profits in 2020, “Tesla stock price just shoots for the roof,” Duggan said. “And Elon Musk was the biggest shareholder, so he was the biggest beneficiary.”
Joe Biden’s administration had a different view from Obama’s. He wanted the legacy car companies to get on board with EV technology, Duggan explained. When Biden’s approach started to work, Tesla’s market share fell from 72% to 49%. “Tesla was so hopping mad, and I think that’s why they turned against Biden,” she said.
Biden also picketed with striking United Auto Workers Union members, we might note, a contrast to Musk and SpaceX, which are in court trying to get the National Labor Relations Act declared unconstitutional.
At this stage, Duggan said, Tesla’s falling sales are not just due to Musk’s unpopularity. “He was the one who had the first electric car, and it was such a revolutionary technology, he thinks that makes him superior, permanently.” But Tesla is no longer the industry leader, she said.
“The cars have a lot of quality defects, and they’re no longer the best in the world,” Duggan told me. The reason Tesla’s stock price is falling, she said, is there are “better cars being produced at a lower price.”
On Thursday, Tesla announced a recall of 46,000 of its Cybertrucks. According to the recall notice, “On affected vehicles, the stainless steel panel of the cantrail assembly may delaminate at the adhesive joint, which may cause the panel to separate from the vehicle.” In other words, an exterior panel glued to the frame is at risk of falling off. “If the cantrail panel separates from the vehicle while in drive,” Tesla says in a statement which ought to be obvious, “it could create a road hazard for following motorists and increase the risk of injury or a collision.”
Whatever the cause of Tesla’s misfortunes, the company has allies in high places. Attorney General Pam Bondi says violent attacks on Tesla property are “nothing short of domestic terrorism,” and will be prosecuted with that in mind. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick has advised people to purchase Tesla stock. And President Trump recently used the White House lawn as a stage to promote the company.
Out on Lafayette Road, the Tesla Takedown protesters did a little verbal sparring with a teenage Trump supporter and waved their signs at the cars going by. “I am so happy with our turnout this morning,” said organizer Jo Jordon, who counted 34 people. “People are energized,” she said.
Returning to the point of the Tesla Takedown, Jordon said, “We are objecting to Elon Musk and his impediments to our government’s functioning. The way that he and his DOGE team are ripping apart the federal government is just impossible to tolerate at this point.” Jordon, who managed contracts as a federal government employee, knows of what she speaks.
Inside the Tesla showroom in Portsmouth, the salesperson said he couldn’t tell whether the protests were having any effect on sales. But the protesters will be back at 10 a.m. next Saturday, for what is billed as a Global Day of Action. A Portsmouth police officer informed the protesters that it was okay for them to stand by the roadside, but that parking in the lot at the Portsmouth Green plaza would not be allowed.
Saturday’s demonstration was the fourth one at the Portsmouth location. Jo Jordon says, “By all appearances, the movement is gaining momentum.”