An anti-Elon Musk poster has popped up in London depicting a Tesla and urging people not to buy one of the billionaire’s “Swasticars”.
Spotted on the side of a bus stop in Bethnal Green, East London earlier this week, the poster leads with a banner reading: “Goes from 0 to 1939 in 3 seconds”.
The image also shows Musk photoshopped into a Tesla – the electric car company for which he is CEO – while performing his now-infamous gesture from Donald Trump’s inauguration rally in January. At the event, the billionaire slapped his chest with his right hand and flung his arm diagonally upwards in what many onlookers have condemned as being reminiscent of a Nazi salute.
The campaigning group Everyone Hates Elon appears to have taken credit for the poster, sharing a photo of the banner being installed on the bus stop. “Be a shame if these popped up around the world,” they wrote on Instagram, before sharing a link to a GoFundMe campaign, promising to send a PDF of the poster to anyone who wants one.
Everyone Hates Elon also posted a TikTok video, where they commented: “Elon Musk just helped the far-right in [Germany] win their best result since WW2. So don’t buy his fucking cars, yeah?”
Musk, currently the world’s richest man, was named by Trump as the head of the new Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and has spent much of the year showing support for right wing European politicians on social media, particularly on X, which he also owns.
One group he has thrown his weight behind is Germany’s Alternatif Fur Deutschland (AfD) party, which recently secured a 20.8 per cent share of the vote in the country’s general election.
Everyone Hates Elon’s fundraiser page includes the statement: “Not happy with fuelling the far-right in the USA, Elon Musk is now doing the same in Europe. We can’t let the richest man in the world poison our politics. While nurses use food banks, his wealth grew by $200 billion last year.”
“We’ve plastered ‘don’t buy a swasticar’ stickers across hundreds of Teslas in London and taken a cardboard cutout of Elon Musk to a Tesla dealership…”
Among Musk’s outspoken critics in recent weeks is his former partner Grimes, who has implored people to stop sharing images of the four-year-old son she shares with Musk, after he was put front and centre at a White House meeting earlier this month.