For years it was extremely rare to see a bumper sticker on a Tesla — the car’s high price range and sleek aesthetic discourage strips of plastic. But that was before hatred for the carmaker’s billionaire CEO Elon Musk peaked.
Hawaii aquarium store manager Matthew Hiller knows how sharply the sentiment has shifted. When he first started selling anti-Musk bumper stickers on his Etsy page in 2023, sales came in at a trickle. Now, they’re at a flood: Musk’s ideological takeover of Twitter and election-year political antics have earned him a new wave of haters.
Some of them own Teslas. Hiller’s most popular sticker reads, “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.” He told SFGATE he’s now sold 15,000 anti-Musk stickers — and California is his biggest market.
Courtesy of Matthew Hiller
Hiller launched the side hustle after test driving a Tesla. He said he’d wanted the car, but then decided handing $40,000 to a Musk-led company was off-limits. Hiller detested the billionaire’s actions at Twitter, now X: Musk manipulated the algorithm to boost his own posts, and amplified “all the wrong people,” Hiller said. The Honolulu resident thought he must not be alone.
“I figured at that time, there must be a lot of people like me who already have a Tesla, who are just like, ‘Wow, I am embarrassed by this guy, I am sickened by this guy,'” Hiller said. So he designed the “before we knew” sticker, in simple black and white, and added it to his Etsy page in February 2023, where he previously sold a range of stickers bearing fish puns.
Sales mostly trickled in at five or six a day, on Etsy and on Amazon, but would speed up briefly after a viral X post or Reddit thread featured the sticker, Hiller said. Business Insider’s September 2023 story on the stickers didn’t name Hiller or his business, but it brought another spike. He designed other versions, like “Anti Elon Tesla Club,” and “F Elon,” using printer companies to create the stickers but doing all the packing and mailing with his wife.
Then Musk stuck his nose into the presidential race — before jumping in headfirst. He endorsed Donald Trump after the former president survived an assassination attempt in July, and went on to become Trump’s most high-profile backer. He dispersed anti-immigrant tropes on X, jumped around onstage at a Trump rally (prompting a spike in sales, per Hiller), plowed money into ground campaigns and launched a $1-million-a-day lottery for swing-state voters.
The day after Trump’s Nov. 5 electoral victory, Hiller said, was his sticker shop’s biggest-ever day of sales. His Amazon storefront shows more than 2,250 purchases of anti-Musk stickers in the month before Nov. 26.
Hiller is now ordering the stickers en masse and printing huge stacks of address labels at once. He said that hundreds of the labels, almost every time, list California locations. “California is by far the highest state that I ship to, but San Francisco, within that, is certainly number one,” Hiller said.
Liberal Tesla drivers have been talking for years about a conflict between their love for the vehicles and their disdain for Musk; SFGATE reported on Bay Area drivers’ angst in 2022. The conflict appears to have even reached the Governor’s office: Gavin Newsom has announced a potential new rebate for electric-vehicle purchases, but per Bloomberg, it leaves Tesla out using a market-share clause. The top EV seller in the U.S., Tesla delivered almost 1.3 million cars from January through September.
Hiller’s reviews on Etsy and Amazon reflect the gap the buyers see between their cars and Musk. Some have mentioned their love for their Model 3 or Model Y, others explain why they purchased the stickers. “Exactly what my dad wanted / needed for his Tesla, which he’s become very embarrassed by,” one Etsy reviewer wrote. Another described themself as a “Tesla owner who does not support Trump or Elon…and don’t wanna get lumped into the pool of all the weirdos that do.”
Hiller is enjoying the sales — despite slim margins and a boatload of envelope-packing work — but he hasn’t actually seen any of his stickers in the wild yet. He said he’s sold some in Hawaii since climate news site Heatmap published an interview with him, and that he’s carrying around an extra few stickers to give out as a gift.
“Every time I see a Tesla driving down the road, I turn my head. Every time I walk into a parking lot, I check every Tesla,” Hiller said. “I want to take a selfie.”
