Elon Musk's alliance with Donald Trump may be over for now, but the Tesla brand has yet to recover from Musk's high profile foray into far-right politics.

Tesla stock has plummeted precipitously ever since Musk’s embrace of Donald Trump last year. It’s been enough to alarm board members, who are now considering replacing Musk as CEO as public “Tesla Takedown” protests have spread across the country.

Ironically, Musk himself was the beneficiary of a similar boycott years ago — a boycott I ran. And since Musk himself is unlikely to relay the story, I will.

In the aftermath of the 2008 market collapse, Toyota announced plans to shutter its Fremont, California factory and move production to Japan, Canada, Mexico, and Mississippi. Not surprisingly, outrage ensued. Soon after, I received a call from the incoming United Auto Workers president Bob King, who asked me to devise a campaign to challenge the Toyota closing.

For Toyota, it was about abandoning California. For Musk, it’s been about dismantling our government and attacking union rights, among other misdeeds.

The strategy we landed on was to reframe this struggle from one borne by workers alone to one that emphasized the broader damage to California’s economy that the closure would cause.

Back then in California, one of every four vehicles sold was a Toyota. As the New York Times’ Bob Herbert wrote in 2010, the U.S. was “the largest market for Toyota vehicles in the world, larger even than Japan.” And the Corolla, built at the Fremont facility, was “the best-selling car of all time.”

But it was that very success that made them vulnerable.

We knew Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays were the prime sales days for most car dealerships. We dispatched our ground troops to cover those three days of the week, in shifts of 8 to 10 people, to 50 dealerships in California and 50 more throughout the United states, holding banners proclaiming, “Toyota Kills California Jobs.”

The company’s sales managers panicked, with several complaining to me personally........

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