Matthew LaBrot, a Tesla employee who created the website Tesla Employees Against Elon Musk, was fired from the company two weeks ago. LaBrot claimed in a LinkedIn post that he was terminated for having created the site, and because he was part of a larger group of employees who publicly asked Elon Musk to resign from the company.
Tesla has faced several crises this year—major recalls, declining sales, litigation, and a volatile stock price, to name a few. Sales of the cars declined for the first time in more than a decade in 2024, and were down again by 13% in the first quarter of 2025. In Europe, the company’s troubles are especially pronounced with a nearly 50 percent sales decline in Germany last month and France seeing a similar 59 percent drop in the same period.
Tesla has blamed falling sales on the release of a new Model Y, the company’s best-selling model. On their Q1 2025 earnings call last month, the company explained that there simply weren’t “enough of the new Model Y available in most markets” at the beginning of the year to make a positive impact on sales.
Not so, say the employees behind the letter, who signed off as “Tesla Employees for a New Chapter.” They argue that Tesla’s troubles are not due to missteps in Model Y production, but rather to the public reputation of the company’s polarizing CEO, Elon Musk. “Let’s be clear: we are not the problem. Our products are not the problem. Our engineering, service, and delivery teams are not the problem. The problem is demand. The problem is Elon.”
It’s worth noting that Tesla itself made a similar statement on its earnings call last month, conceding somewhat hilariously that “unwanted hostility towards our brand and our people had an impact [on sales] in certain markets.”
This assessment jibes with expert analysis, much of which has blamed Tesla’s struggling sales on its CEO’s recent foray into right-wing politics. Last year, Musk donated at least $288 million to help elect Donald Trump and other republican candidates to office. And as a special advisor to President Trump, Musk has spent much of his 2025 at the helm of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), home to the administration’s efforts to dramatically cut (and falsely boast about cutting) government spending.
In early 2025, Musk’s participation in politics sparked a grassroots protest movement called Tesla Takedown, which has rallied demonstrators at Tesla showrooms and charging stations around the country. And while it has since recovered some losses, the company’s stock price plummeted at the beginning of the year. Through mid-March, the company’s share price had dropped by 38% since the beginning of 2025.
Amid pressure from investors, Musk announced on Tesla’s Q1 earnings call that he’d be stepping back from his work in Washington to spend more time at the company.
In their open letter, Tesla Employees for a New Chapter called Musk’s decision “tone-deaf” and “insulting.” “It implies that the hardships of the past six months stem from a lack of his attention, not from his actions. It shifts the blame onto the very people who have held this company together,” they continued.
According to his LinkedIn, LaBrot worked in “Sales and Delivery Training” at Tesla and had been with the company for more than five years before his dismissal.
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