A spokesperson for the British activist collective Everyone Hates Elon presented the group’s methods at a digital rights conference in Barcelona, describing how a small team has used humour and guerrilla marketing to challenge the influence of billionaires including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.
The collective has claimed responsibility for a series of highly visible actions, including fake Tesla advertisements, a banner criticising Jeff Bezos’s wedding in Venice, a large installation featuring a photograph of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump near Windsor, and a campaign mocking Meta’s smart glasses. It has also raised more than €200,000 for LGBTQI+ organisations such as Rainbow Migration and supported Amazon workers involved in union activity.
According to the spokesperson, who used the name Jason, the group emerged in January 2025 after Musk made a gesture at Donald Trump’s inauguration that was widely criticised as a Nazi salute. The founders, who work for non-governmental organisations, began by encouraging donations linked to Musk’s activity on X and by distributing stickers criticising Tesla. Their later actions included placing life-sized figures of Musk in Tesla dealerships and turning a damaged Tesla into an artwork sold to raise money for food banks.
The collective identifies three main lessons from its campaigns. The first is to make an alternative event more entertaining than the event or subject being targeted. Its members argue that humour helps messages spread through social media and personal networks more effectively than conventional reports about inequality.
The second lesson is to think like a tabloid newspaper. In its campaign against Bezos, Everyone Hates Elon worked with Greenpeace to influence coverage of the Amazon founder’s wedding and the Met Gala, where Bezos and his wife attended as major benefactors. The group placed posters around New York, staged installations inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art and projected a video featuring Amazon workers onto Bezos’s Manhattan residence.
The activists said their campaign helped frame the Met Gala as a protest against the Bezos family before the event took place. They also cited media reach for their actions, claiming that coverage appeared in four out of five media outlets and reached billions of people, including 35 million through the group’s own social media channels.
The third lesson is to identify a clear villain. Everyone Hates Elon argues that campaigns about inequality, climate change or migration are more likely to mobilise people when they identify who the group believes is responsible for the problem. The collective says billionaires often blame immigrants or transgender people for social difficulties that it attributes to the powerful instead.
Jason described the group’s work as an asymmetric campaign: its targets control major platforms and possess enormous financial resources, while the activists operate with comparatively small budgets. The collective has not been sued by any of its targets, although its members say they remain concerned about possible legal action. They believe litigation could draw even more attention to their claims.
Everyone Hates Elon says it is preparing further actions. Its test for a new campaign is whether the targeted billionaire is likely to dislike it; if so, the group considers that a sign that the action may have achieved its purpose.
Sources: El País Cultura.