Can Tesla survive Trump and Elon's bromance?

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Hi, it's PK here from the podcast Politics Now.

And as the politicians hit the streets, this election campaign will help you navigate the spin.

He said, like, sometimes I'll go into a press conference and I'll drop a little something that I know will annoy lefties.

And bring you the deeper analysis on what matters to you.

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Is doing this to a Tesla dealership evil?

The suspect used a firearm and Molotov cocktails to damage the center and destroy multiple vehicles that were parked on site.

Throwing Molotov cocktails at any building is definitely illegal and also bad.

Don't throw Molotov cocktails at things, please.

But what about this?

They've got that little stock app.

I added Tesla to it to give me a little boost during the day.

225 and dropping.

That's former Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Waltz indulging in a little bit of Schadenfreude at the rapid drop in Tesla's stock price over the last few months.

His comments made Tesla CEO Elon Musk very sad.

I mean, you have Tim Waltz, who's a huge jerk,

you know,

running around on stage with the Tesla stock price,

where the stock price had gone in half.

And he was overjoyed.

What an evil thing to do.

Well, it's mean, sure, but is it evil?

Is selling your stock in Tesla evil?

It's certainly something that Elon Musk does not want you to do.

So what I'm saying is hang on to your stock.

And what about just not buying a Tesla car?

Is that evil?

Globally, Tesla sales plummeted last month.

Slumping in Europe with a drop of about 40% across Scandinavia and 76% in Germany.

They're also down 72% in Australia compared with February last year.

While the stock price and the arson and vandalism are the things getting all the headlines, this is by far the most important thing that is happening to Tesla right now.

Sales across the world are falling as people look for other electric cars.

And that's at least partially because of Elon Musk's charged bromance with the US president.

Here's a man that I can tell you, he's a friend of mine.

He's become a friend of mine.

He supported me in the election.

Since Trump took office, Musk has become his autonomous chainsaw, slicing up the US federal government with his Doge team.

It appears that his connections with Trump have led to a full-blown multinational boycott of all things Tesla.

But this isn't unprecedented.

In fact, America has seen a very similar boycott movement in the past against one of the country's top beer brands because of the conservative views of the company's owners.

That boycott lasted for decades, and the story of why it happened is extraordinary.

It tells us a lot about what can be achieved when a whole lot of ordinary people band together to stick it to billionaires.

So, can Musk or his opponents learn anything from the past?

I'm Matt Bevan, and this is if you're listening.

The largest brewery in the world is in the Colorado town of Golden, just outside Denver.

Nestled in between the train lines and brew houses is a white 22-room historic mansion, which was built by the brewery's founder, Adolph Koors.

In the drawing room of that house is a Steinway grand piano.

And the reason the piano is there is because of Adolph Koors' grandson Bill.

This is Bill Coors playing the piano.

He is really quite good at it.

Here's why.

I had a bicycle accident when I was six years old and I injured myself and was never allowed any kind of contact sports from that time on.

When Bill Coors was growing up, his big brother Ad and little brother Joe would go out and play football and baseball, but he couldn't join them.

So I stayed indoors and banged away at the piano.

I'm sure my mother wanted me to be a concert pianist.

I had a certain, I guess, talent for it.

Life was tough for a family of brewers in the 1920s.

It was the era of prohibition.

The U.S.

federal government had banned alcohol across the nation, so why not become a pianist?

But by the time Bill was ready to leave school, Prohibition was over and there was beer to be made.

Of course, my father wanted me to be a chemical engineer, and he won out.

By the time they were in their 40s, Ad, Bill, and Joe were all working together at the brewery.

Although it seems from his list of jobs that Bill was basically running the whole place.

We weren't all that formal in those days.

Titles didn't mean anything, you just got the job done.

The family was conservative in every sense of the word, not only politically but in their lifestyle.

Despite being the owners of an incredibly profitable brewery, they lived in modest homes and any extra money they had on hand was reinvested into the company or donated to charity.

They also liked to think that they looked after their workers.

To work at cause was basically a job for life.

You got paid well, you could call Bill by his first name, you got free beer, and you could drink during the workday.

Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, according to Bill, life as a Coors employee was so good that he was convinced that his workforce didn't need unions.

See, like a lot of American business tycoons, Bill hated unions.

He hated them so much, in fact, that it became the major driver behind his innovation.

For instance, when the factory that provided steel beer cans to Coors went on strike, he invented the aluminium beer can

and the system for recycling them.

Yes, the recyclable aluminium drinks can we all use today was invented by Bill Coors to bust a strike.

60 Minutes asked him about his famous anti-union attitude.

Bill Coors, you said unions are a result of poor management.

From the idealistic standpoint, if management is properly concerned with the needs of the workers, not just material needs, but with health and spiritual and philosophical needs, I don't believe a union's needed.

I said it and I'm proud of it, Mike.

That's exactly the way I feel.

In 1960, the Coors family was in the midst of one of their frequent tussles with the unions when one morning, Bill's big brother Ad didn't show up to work.

His car had been found, still running, on on the route that he usually took each morning.

A large pool of blood was on the road.

A woman nearby said that she heard two gunshots.

And the family gets a note from the kidnapper demanding ransom and agrees to pay the ransom.

This is journalist Dan Bourne, who covered the saga in his book Citizen Cause.

And then nothing ever happens.

The kidnapper disappears, and Ad is gone.

Though they didn't tell the family, the FBI investigators knew from the amount of blood on the road that Ad could not be alive.

This was a murder investigation.

Bill instantly suspected the unions might be behind this.

The media speculated about this too.

In the end, it turns out that Ad was just unbelievably unlucky.

The killer was just a random guy.

an escaped prisoner who thought that kidnapping the heir to the Coors brewery would make him rich.

His scheme was to pretend to have a broken down car and ask Ad for help,

but when he pulled out his gun, Ad Coors ran for it.

The would-be kidnapper shot him twice in the back and he died right there on the road.

The shock and suspicion changed Bill forever.

He became obsessed with the loyalty of his workers.

He subjected new recruits to lie detector tests and sent the entire workforce into therapy.

They ran everybody through psychiatrists in order to spy on them.

They were having all the psychiatrists notes rooted to them because they wanted to see who wasn't loyal to the family.

I kind of see Bill as a bit like Elon Musk, at least up to 2024.

An innovator, someone driven to succeed, someone obsessed with the productivity of his workers, someone who hates unions.

Tesla is the only non-union car company in America.

Musk says he disagrees with the idea of unions because they create a divide between workers and managers.

There are many people at Tesla who have gone from working on the line to being in senior management.

There is no lords and peasants.

Everyone eats at the same table.

Everyone parks in the same parking lot.

So if Bill Koors is pre-2024 Elon Musk, Who is post-2024 Elon Musk?

Most of you know that Joe and I are close, and he's given me some great advice over the years.

This is former US President Ronald Reagan, and the Joe he's talking about is Bill's little brother, Joe Coors, who was a key supporter and donor to Reagan for two decades.

Joe's a man of high principle and a dear friend.

Joe helped me get my current job, and now he's there having a good time.

Bill and Joe Coors sat at twin desks a foot apart in the same office for four decades.

But Bill's competence, dedication, innovation and success meant that Joe had a lot of time and resources on his hands.

Time and resources which he used to spread his political opinion as far as possible.

Joe is one of the most generous men I know, contributing to so many worthy causes.

Bill said that Joe was as conservative as they come and described him as a little bit to the right of Attila the Hun.

He said it was best if they didn't discuss politics.

Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, loved Joe's politics and once told this joke about Joe's advice for wearing a hearing aid.

He advised me if I have trouble hearing, I should wear it in my right ear.

That's Joe for you.

He never wants to hear from the left.

Joe didn't just back Reagan financially.

He and his wife Holly also established the nation's first conservative think tank.

He's a very, very politically conservative guy and through a series of circumstances founds the Heritage Foundation,

which gives the conservative movement in the United States its first piece of real estate.

Ever since Prohibition nearly destroyed his family's empire, Joe had passionately hated government meddling.

The Heritage Foundation's mission was to get the U.S.

government out of everyone's lives.

Joe and Holly, I won't even mention the personal debt that I owe each of you.

Let me just say that no one has been more important to Heritage's success and that of the conservative movement than the two of you.

Together, Bill and Joe Coors were a conservative force to be reckoned with, famously anti-union and anti-big government.

And all of this conservative activity painted a big target on the Coors family.

The Coors family has been routinely denounced as racist, sexist, union bashing, and its beer products have been boycotted by organized labor, racial minorities, women, gays, students and teachers for more than a decade.

The boycott started small.

with Mexican-Americans, Chicanos, in the 1960s, who accused the Coors family of discriminating against them in their hiring practices.

They're so racist and discriminatory and anti-union in their practices and policies.

In the 1970s, the boycott spread to the Teamsters, the union representing Coors' delivery drivers in California.

Then, the San Francisco gay rights community got on board, and by 1975, there wasn't a gay bar in the state of California that would serve you a cause.

From there, it spread uncontrollably, right across the country.

A rumor spread that Joe Coors had donated to the anti-gun lobby, so hunters and gun owners got involved in the boycott.

And then, when the cause company denied that rumor, the anti-gun lobby joined the boycott as well.

In the 70s, a broad coalition of gays, Chicanos, and truck drivers all standing side by side on a picket line was extremely unusual.

But the strength of the boycott was in just how easy it was to participate.

Buy a Budweiser instead of a cause and you were expressing solidarity.

The weakness was that while everyone in the coalition agreed they hated cause, they couldn't agree on what cause actually had to do to get them back on side.

And here's where the true differences between Bill and Joe emerge.

They turned the country rightward, but they had to change their practices within the walls of their beloved brewery because

they were so beat up by this boycott.

Bill took the accusations that he was mistreating his workers seriously.

He set up one of America's first employee wellness centers at the brewery, and he made an effort to hire more diverse staff.

Then in 1982, Bill gave 60 Minutes investigative journalist Mike Wallace full access to Coors' entire operation, its staff, and its books to to look into the workplace conditions.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission now considers Coors one of the leading affirmative action employers in Colorado.

13% of Coors employees are minority members, black, Hispanic, Indian.

Gay journalists have visited the Coors plant and have decided there is no foundation for continuing a boycott of Coors on the issue of homosexuality.

By the end of the 1980s, Coors had donated more than $600 million to minority organisations.

That's more than $1.5 billion in today's money.

But despite the wellness center and the charitable donations, the Coors boycott ebbed, but it never really lifted.

And that's because even though the boycott had been started by unions as a protest against workplace conditions, it had grown to be primarily a protest against the Coors family's politics.

We know of their politics, we know what they do.

No matter how many

Hispanic representatives they hire, their politics remain the same and they're against the interests of the Latino community.

The lesson of the cause boycott was mixing business and politics can have big ramifications if your business is selling something that can be easily boycotted.

Think about the kind of billionaires who get involved in politics these days.

They're in banking, investing, logistics, that kind of thing.

How are you meant to boycott a mining company?

Fast forward to 2025 and a lot has changed.

Bill and Joe are dead.

Coors is the major sponsor of the Denver Pride Parade, but some things have stayed the same.

You'll still struggle to find a Coors beer in a San Francisco gay bar.

And the conservative think tank that Joe Coors founded, the Heritage Foundation, They are more powerful than ever before.

Project 2025 is a new paradigm in helping the Conservative President be ready to govern day one.

You remember Project 2025?

A detailed plan for destroying the American administrative state?

Project 2025 aims to remove any bureaucrat who resists the president.

Critics warn that replacing them with loyalists will enable Trump to carry out a radical agenda.

Yeah, that one, the one that's being rolled out right now.

Project 2025 isn't some rabble operation.

It's run by the influential and conservative Heritage Foundation.

The work of Project 2025 is being carried out by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency, Doge.

People don't like it.

And while it's hard to boycott Musk's spaceship company, not buying a Tesla is pretty easy.

Getting rid of the Tesla you already own is easy, although it is getting harder.

We are looking potentially potentially at other brands.

It's just difficult now because the resale value at the moment is not very good.

And of course, this is also causing people to not buy Teslas at all.

But the rapid spread of the anti-Musk movement has created some similar problems to the anti-cause boycott.

Without any centralised list of demands, it's unclear what the end game is.

If Musk resigns from Doge and steps back from the White House, would the boycott be over?

It's probably a bit too late for that, to be honest, especially when Donald Trump has tied himself to the Tesla brand by purchasing a car from Musk on the White House lawn.

This is beautiful.

Whoa!

Should I get in?

Get in!

Okay.

Trump has just implemented a 25% tariff on all foreign-made cars, a policy that will definitely assist Tesla, which is the only automaker that is entirely based in the US.

Or does Tesla have to be sent bankrupt before protesters are satisfied?

In which case, you're destroying the last all-American car car brand and handing full control of the transition to electric cars to China.

I think the Coors story tells us that the boycott is probably not going to change Elon Musk's behaviour.

The boycott might have improved conditions at the Coors Brewery, but Joe Coors never budged on his right-wing politics.

In fact, the Coors boycott kind of gave us Project 2025

and a world old mate Joe could really only dream of.

Tesla could shrink to a hundredth of its current size, and Elon Musk would still be a billionaire.

And it's more likely to just make him more angry, erratic, and petulant than he already is.

Anyway, I think it's beer o'clock.

Matt, you know it's 11 a.m.

Yeah,

still.

If you're listening, is written by me, Matt Bevan.

Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinnon.

Audio production is by Cinnamon Nippard.

So, this is our last episode for a couple of weeks.

The Australian election has been called, and we're going to be doing a special series about the role of social media in politics and how billionaires like Elon Musk are using it to influence elections all over the world.

It will be right here on the podcast feed on the 24th of April.

Before that, a final reminder that our live show is on in Newcastle on Sunday afternoon, the 6th of April, at four o'clock as part of the Newcastle Writers Festival.

And we are currently in the process of booking live shows in other cities as well.

If you are in another city and want us to come and play at your venue, hit us up.

If you're listening at abc.net.au is our email address.

I'll see you soon.

Hello there, I'm Mark Finnell and you may know me as the guy who finds the stuff that the British stole.

Still doing that, but I'm also embarking now on a new hunt.

This is a hunt for the people, the objects, the actions, the stuff-ups, the moments that essentially changed the course of history, but at the time,

no one saw them coming.

Each week, we will unravel stories from across the globe, from bizarre crimes you might never have heard of.

He's using the early 20th century equivalent of a Hive's vest and a lanyard to get into the Louvre undetected.

To brushes with death, the changed science.

He sort of becomes like a boogeyman or a demon.

Something you read, it sort of sends a chill down your spine.

You'll meet the people whose presence continues to be felt from the grave.

He imagined a secret society which would be watching the schools, the universities, to establish a worldwide English-speaking global elite.

There is no chapter of history that is off limits, and each and every one of these inflection points has somehow reshaped your life and my life.

I don't think this is talked about enough.

The outcome of World War II was not a foregone conclusion.

We think that restitution is a contemporary debate.

It's really not.

It's been going on forever.

No one saw it coming.

Brand new episodes every Tuesday.

You can listen on the ABC Listen Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Had Freud been alive at the time, he would have had a field day with all of this.