'I'm embarrassed driving it': Tesla owners turn on Musk

Embarrassed Tesla owners have started to publicly display their dismay at Elon Musk as he has moved ever closer to the US president-elect, Donald Trump, and various far-right conspiracy theories.

- Oliver Milman Marina Dunbar

Sales of anti-Musk stickers have boomed since the world's richest man declared his support for Trump and helped propel him to victory in the US presidential election, as owners of Teslas, the car brand headed by Musk, try to distance themselves from the South African-born multibillionaire.

"Sales have really spiked. The day after the election was the biggest day ever," said Matt Hiller, a Hawaii-based aquarium worker who sells a range of stickers online that denounce Musk. "People saw a billionaire supervillain buy his way into the administration and it rubbed them the wrong way."

Hiller started the sticker range last year after deciding against buying a Tesla owing to Musk's "amplifying of horrible people and silencing of others" on X, formerly Twitter, another of his companies. He said several hundred stickers a day were being sold, primarily to Tesla owners, bearing texts such as "Anti Elon Tesla Club" or "I Bought This Before Elon Went Crazy", or a picture of Musk in clown makeup with the words "Space Clown".

"People keep telling me that they feel they can drive their Teslas again with these stickers," said Hiller, who has had to set aside part of his house to accommodate the growing operation. Hiller devises slogans such as "Elon Ate My Cat", a reference to a debunked falsehood about migrants eating pets in Ohio, and the stickers are then sold on Etsy and Amazon. "People are shaken up. It's a relief really to see they are awake," he said of the surging demand.