Former Tesla Dealership Manager Says It's "Game Over" for Elon Musk

Joe Wilkins

Fri, Jun 13, 2025, 2:18 PM 3 min read

Back in May, as Tesla Takedown rallies and anti-Musk vandalism rocked the world, Tesla dealership manager Matthew LaBrot launched "Tesla Employees Against Elon" — an act of protest that swiftly got him fired.

We wrote about LaBrot's symbolic act of defiance against Musk's political maneuvers at the time. Now, a fresh tell-all interview with Hard Reset is shining some light on just how drastically things have changed for Tesla over the past few months.

LaBrot is, first and foremost, a Tesla superfan. He currently rotates between driving a Tesla Model Y and a Cybertruck, despite getting sacked by the company. A self-described "EV activist," LaBrot's issue isn't with the brand per se, as his website makes clear: "the problem is Elon."

"You know, this wasn't a new thing for me," he said of his digital protest. "For almost six years, I’ve been focused on overcoming misinformation about EVs and helping grow that mission."

"Once we hit a tipping point where the person who's running this company is now pushing customers away from the mission, then the priority shifted," he continued. "That priority was to be an activist to try to save the company."

Having worked with Tesla since 2019, LaBrot had a front row seat as the trepidation with Musk began to set in. In recent years, he found it wasn't hesitation over electric vehicles, but with the noxious man the brand now seemed to represent pushing customers away.

"We noticed customers, return customers, shying away from us a little bit," he noted. "And that's when I started to see the things that he [Musk] was putting on Twitter and the political views he started to have."

The tipping point, the former EV salesman said, was the billionaire's infamous salute.

"When it came to the salute — I still call it a salute — I was like, Tesla's going to take care of this," he told Hard Reset. "In 2010, CEOs were getting fired for having affairs. This guy's doing all this crazy stuff and Tesla's not going to do anything?"

That was when he realized how deep Musk's rot went, especially when Tesla's board of directors "doubled down and made him even more of a figurehead."

Now, LaBrot's not surprised that decision is biting those same executives in the craw.

Going forward, "they're absolutely hosed," he said. "I expect gigantic drops in sales, even potentially lower than Q1 sales."

Asked whether Musk can fix the damage he's caused the brand, the former manager isn't optimistic.

"I don't think that there's anything he can do to change the people's opinion that have decided they're not going to support Tesla outside of him leaving," LaBrot asserted.