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A former Tesla employee claims he was fired by the company for setting up a website attacking Elon Musk after he became increasingly disenchanted with the company’s CEO over his role in the Trump administration.
Matthew LaBrot, 35, told Business Insider that he set up the Tesla Employees Against Elon site on Thursday, April 24, in order to reach out to other disaffected staff members.
The simple site provides points of contact and states plainly in an open letter that Tesla “is at a pivotal moment,” arguing that Musk’s political activities, notably heading up the administration’s DOGE arm, are harming the company and jeopardizing its future.
“The damage done to Elon’s personal brand is now irreversible and as the public face of Tesla, that damage has become our burden,” it states.
“We are now at a crossroads: continue with Elon as CEO and face further decline as customers abandon the brand, or move forward without him and allow our products and mission to succeed or fail on their own.”
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“Our products are not the problem. Our engineering, service, and delivery teams are not the problem. The problem is demand. The problem is Elon,” the message concludes.
LaBrot claims that, a day after setting the site live, he drove his Cybertruck – newly painted with the slogan “Pro Clean Energy, Pro Sustainability, Pro EV, Pro Tesla, Anti Elon” – to a “Tesla Takedown” rally in California.
Less than 24 hours later, he says he received a call from Tesla’s Human Resources department notifying him that his contract was being terminated for using company resources to build a website that did not align with its perspective, an accusation he denies.
The Independent has reached out to Tesla for comment.
The incident marked a sad end to LaBrot’s successful career with the electric vehicle manufacturer, which began in 2019.
“I wasn’t planning on working anywhere else,” he said. “I was very happy with my position, and I could have continued to work in that role my whole life.”
A former Best Buy and Starbucks employee who had moved into real estate, LaBrot says that he first joined Tesla because he believed in its sustainability ethos and rose quickly through its ranks. He eventually secured a program management role for sales and delivery training in North America and even appeared in demonstration videos.
LaBrot said he first became concerned about the world’s richest man’s leadership when he acquired Twitter in 2022 and turned it into X. Later, he regretted that he had decided to “stick my head in the sand” rather than speak out.
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His concerns grew as Musk became more vocal in support of Trump as last year’s presidential election progressed. The billionaire ultimately donated at least $277m to the president’s war chest.
LaBrot says the tipping point for him personally was the moment on the day of Trump’s inauguration at the U.S. Capitol in January when Musk performed a controversial salute.
“When your CEO makes one of those decisions, it pulls the company along with it,” his former employee reflected.
For his part, Musk has attempted to reassure company shareholders and staff that his political operations would have no bearing on Tesla’s results, insisting: “I think people really care about the quality of the product as opposed to whether they agree or disagree with the CEO’s views.
“The CEO of any given company is going to have political views. At the end of the day, what matters is if Tesla makes a great product, and people like buying great products.”
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LaBrot increasingly came to believe that Musk’s rationalizing of the situation did not correspond with what was actually happening on dealership forecourts.
“By election time, we really started to realize 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.”
When protests and acts of vandalism began to happen at dealerships in the U.S. and Europe in response to the DOGE-driven mass firing of federal workers, LaBrot felt the company was insufficiently forthcoming in internal communications and offered scant guidance on how sales staff should handle the hostility.
“They’re talking about struggling sales and how do we increase the close rate, without talking about this humongous elephant in the room,” he said.
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Of his decision to break ranks and speak out by publishing Tesla Employees Against Elon last month, La Brot concluded: “When it went live, I felt so relieved, like a weight had been lifted.
“This statement I’ve been trying to put into words, been expressing in company meetings – finally publishing it was a really good feeling.”
Earlier this month, Musk and Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm reacted angrily to a Wall Street Journal report alleging that the carmaker was in the process of headhunting a new CEO to replace the billionaire in response to company profits declining by 71 percent in the first quarter.
Denholm called the story “absolutely false” and said: “The CEO of Tesla is Elon Musk and the board is highly confident in his ability to continue executing on the exciting growth plan ahead.”
