Obama Advisor Calls for Tesla Boycott After Elon Musk’s Appalling Trump Endorsement

Loud Silence

A longtime Democratic presidential advisor is calling for a Tesla boycott after Elon Musk's endorsement of Donald Trump for president.

In an editorial for The Guardian, economist Robert Reich — a former advisor to president Barack Obama and secretary of labor under Bill Clinton — argued that "wealth is most dangerous when transformed into political power" and that the best response to Musk's is to take some of that money away from him.

Indeed, the "silent boycott" of Tesla among liberals, as the sustainable business blog Triple Pundit calls it, may soon get louder. As analysts noted in the wake of Musk's endorsement and alleged donation pledges to Trump — among other appalling behavior like publicly deadnaming his trans daughter — a proper boycott has long loomed over Musk's increasingly far-right politicking.

While Musk's Trump endorsement itself was made in the public square of X-formerly-Twitter, his alleged donations to a political action committee set up to re-elect Trump remain hazier — and as Reich suggests, that opacity is by design.

Big Spenders

Reich knows a thing or two about the pitfalls of money in politics. To his mind, Musk's secretive political spending, as revealed in a new investigation from the New York Times, is the logical endpoint of shady campaigning that shields individual donors from disclosing how much they've given to their candidates of choice.

That appears to be the case, Reich explained, with the South African-Canadian billionaire's donations to a political action committee set up specifically to support Trump, which has allowed both candidate and donor to obfuscate about how much money is being given.

"We may never know how much Musk is plunking down for Trump because of Musk’s avowed distaste for groups whose donors must be legally disclosed," Reich wrote. "Musk prefers to wield his political power through dark money."

However, buyers wield the power of the dollar — and they can, as Reich suggests, boycott Musk's companies.

"Use your economic power," he advised. "Boycott Tesla and tell advertisers to boycott [X-formerly-Twitter]."

More on Musk's appalling politics: Elon Musk Goes on Transphobic Tirade About His Trans Child