A longtime Tesla employee was fired just 24 hours after launching a protest website critical of CEO Elon Musk and attending a demonstration outside a Tesla facility, according to a Business Insider report. Matthew LaBrot, who joined the electric vehicle giant in 2019 and rose to a regional training role, said he launched the initiative because he could no longer reconcile his values with Musk’s political leanings, particularly his support for Donald Trump.
“I wasn’t planning on working anywhere else,” LaBrot told Business Insider. “I was very happy with my position, and I could have continued to work in that role my whole life.”
LaBrot’s protest website went live on April 24, and the following day, he appeared at a “Tesla Takedown” event holding a sign that read “Pro Tesla, Not Elon!” He was terminated the day after.
His dissent comes at a time when Tesla is battling multiple crises: sagging demand, growing EV competition, and what many employees say is reputational fallout from Musk’s political actions. In the first quarter of 2024, Tesla reported a 13% drop in global deliveries. In California, long considered a Tesla stronghold, vehicle registrations fell by more than 15%, according to state data.
Inside Tesla, LaBrot said, it was clear that Musk’s increasingly partisan profile was pushing away a portion of the company’s once-diverse customer base.
“By election time, we really started to realise that these customers we’d expected to see weren’t coming,” he said. “We didn’t have to do a ton of overcoming objections because those customers just stopped coming.”
LaBrot, who describes himself as a Democrat and had been an outspoken internal advocate for Tesla’s mission of clean energy, said his discomfort escalated after Musk acquired Twitter (now X) in 2022. He grew increasingly frustrated by Musk’s political donations and his alleged salute at Trump’s inauguration, which many viewed as inappropriate.
“When your CEO makes one of those decisions, it pulls the company along with it,” LaBrot said.
Tesla has not commented on LaBrot’s firing or his claims. Musk, in past statements, has dismissed suggestions that his political positions affect Tesla’s brand perception. “At the end of the day, what matters is if Tesla makes a great product,” he said last year.
But LaBrot isn’t buying it. He believes Tesla’s core values are at risk of being overshadowed by its CEO’s political identity. “I support Tesla’s mission,” he said. “But I think it’s time the company had a new CEO.”