Is Elon Musk really bad for the climate?

Hell, yeah! Like most billionaires, Elon Musk’s personal carbon footprint is grotesque: Oxfam calculated that his private jets alone emit the equivalent of 11 people’s lifetime emissions in just one year. But that’s not all. A single Starship launch from his SpaceX programme emits 76,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases: the average Brit emits just 5 tonnes in an entire year. Musk created his Hyperloop project as part of a campaign against sustainable public transport, in this instance California High Speed Rail. His AI business, like other AI businesses, uses huge amounts of energy and water. We could go on….

 

But surely Tesla can’t be bad for the climate?

Ya think?! Tesla is a notorious polluter with significant carbon emissions. Rather than moving towards affordably priced EVs or—heaven forfend!—supporting public transport, Tesla’s last product was the Cybertruck, which is very far from climate-friendly.

 

Is Elon Musk a climate denier?
Not exactly. He has tweeted that he believes climate change is real, just that it’s happening much more slowly than “alarmists” claim: He attributed the LA wildfires to bad government, not climate change. (Scientists disagree.) However, he does support climate deniers. He is a passionate advocate for Donald Trump, who has rolled back climate regulation, plans to accelerate fossil fuel extraction, and has described climate change as a “hoax” and a “scam”.

 

Has Musk funded far-right movements?
Musk sets up his political donations so that they’re hard to trace, but he’s given hundreds of millions of dollars to Trump and Trump-aligned movements. Musk has used his X megaphone to support far-right activist “Tommy Robinson” (a convicted fraudster and Islamophobe whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon). Robinson’s team has claimed that Musk paid his legal fees. Musk has also campaigned for Germany’s AfD, a far-right party that advocates for citizenship based on bloodline. Hate speech surged on X after his purchase and the EU is investigating possible manipulation of the algorithm to favour rightwing voices.

 

I get that Musk is interfering in US politics, but is he a problem in the UK?

Yes, absolutely. Under the mantle of freedom of speech—which, for Musk, includes banning use of the word “cisgender” as a slur and altering community moderation standards to attack Volodymyr Zelenskyy—he’s unbanned racists, Nazis, and Islamophobes from X. He’s told a flood of lies about Keir Starmer, mused about supporting Reform financially, and called for Nigel Farage to step down after he refused to support Tommy Robinson. 

 

But come on! Musk’s just a tech guy! It’s not like he has blood on his hands!

Remember when Musk boasted on X about “feeding USAID into the woodchipper”? USAID, America’s overseas aid agency, existed to make the world a safer, healthier place for all of us while supporting US policy objectives and growing markets for American products through soft power. The funding cuts Musk made have already killed thousands. To take but one example: The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, founded by George W. Bush, has saved more than 25 million lives to date. As of 1 March, experts claim almost 15,000 adults and 1,500 children supported by that programme have died: Hundreds of thousands more may die as a consequence of these cuts.

 

Is Tesla’s stock price really vulnerable?

Yes. Tesla is a manufacturing company, which typically have low price-to-earnings (PE) ratios, a key stock market measure: Tech companies, like Google and Apple, have much higher PE ratios. On 1 March 2025), carmaker Stellantis’ PE ratio was around 7:1; Google’s PE ratio was about 21:1; chip star Nvidia’s PE ratio was 42:1; Tesla’s was around 140:1. Tesla’s main revenue stream is its cars, and in 2024 it sold less than 2 million: It turned a profit for the first time in 2020, but exclusively thanks to carbon tax credits. Put crudely, Tesla’s stock price relies on investors betting that Elon Musk is a genius and that in the future the company will sell loads and loads of shiny new things. Have a podcast!

 

This sounds great but aren’t we hurting people who work for Tesla?

This is a valid point. There are many good people who joined Tesla for good reasons and if we succeed some will join the casualties of DOGE and become unemployed. Many, however, will find new jobs at the businesses which absorb Tesla’s market share and/or buy up its manufacturing facilities. Fundamentally, it’s more important to stop Musk from driving authoritarianism, nationalism and climate denial, as well as gutting the US government, than it is to protect these people’s jobs.

 

And will this hurt the Trump government?

Yes. Musk is the most powerful man within the Trump regime. His position there relies on two things: his great wealth, which enables him to threaten senators and congresspeople with primaries, and the perception of him as a business genius, which legitimises his vandalism of the US government. Tanking the stock of his only publicly traded company and the one most associated with his brand a) makes him poorer and b) shows he’s a huckster, not a genius. Musk and Trump are in lockstep, and what hits Musk, hits Trump too.

​

I'm not in the UK. Where can I join my nearest TeslaTakedown?
That's a great question. We're a decentralised network and everyone's got day jobs so we're not really organised yet. For the US, TeslaTakedown.com is a great clearing house, with another directory here: Bay Area folk can head to 999 Van Ness Ave at noon on a Saturday or Monday. In the EU, visit StopElon.EU. You can also follow the #TeslaTakedown hashtag on Bluesky, as well as Alex Winter and Edward Niedermeyer (and us, if you like). If you know a site or a link we should mention here, please drop us a line.​​

​

​

​