OLD AND BUSTED: Displaying anger towards the current president by putting stickers on gas pumps with rapidly rising fuel prices.
The New Hotness? Tagging your own car! For Tesla Owners, a Referendum Through Bumper Stickers.
The solution, for many Tesla owners on both ends of that spectrum, has been to slap a bumper sticker on their car to let people know how they feel about Mr. Musk.
Mr. Hiller, who lives in Honolulu and works at the Waikiki Aquarium, became a key player in the situation by being ahead of the curve thanks to his side business: an Etsy shop called Mad Puffer Stickers.
At first, Mr. Hiller just sold stickers with fish illustrations (e.g. an image of a clownfish with the caption “Don’t talk to me. I’m a fishtrovert”) on Etsy and Amazon. He had been considering buying a Tesla, but in early 2023, several months after Mr. Musk completed his takeover of Twitter, Mr. Hiller said he found himself alienated by what he characterized as misinformation on the site.
“So I’m like, there’s no way I’m buying a Tesla: I don’t want to give this guy a penny,” he said. “Then I started thinking, there’s got to be so many people who are just embarrassed, who have a Tesla already, and they’re like, ‘Oh my god, now I’m repping this guy. I don’t want to endorse anything this guy stands for.’”
That is when he added the new bumper sticker — “I Bought This Before We Knew Elon Was Crazy” — to his offerings, aiming to draw in left-leaning Tesla owners. Initially, he sold between five and 10 of the stickers a day. But as Mr. Musk became increasingly outspoken in his support of Mr. Trump, more orders started to flow in, with Mr. Hiller reporting he has sold around 18,000 of the stickers across 30 countries.
“It’s become a pretty good side business,” Mr. Hiller said.
In an era of out-of-control leftist violence and vandalism, the stickers also serve as the equivalent of those “No radio onboard” signs seen on cars parked on the streets of leftist urban hellscapes. The self-hating Tesla driver’s stickers have the goal of reminding the potential vandal that the owner of the car is as disappointed as he could be with the man who designed it (in-between designing spacecraft and overseeing global communications platforms).