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Anti-Elon Tesla sticker maker confirms some customers don’t disapprove of Musk
Some of Hiller’s customers may not necessarily disapprove of Elon Musk’s politics or his work with the Trump administration.
Amidst the ongoing controversies and campaigns against Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Hawaii-based entrepreneur Matthew Hiller has made a killing. Hiller is the man behind some of the most popular anti-Elon Musk stickers that have been spotted in Teslas over the past months.
But in a recent comment to NPR, Hiller shared something rather interesting—some of his customers are purchasing stickers even if they do not necessarily disapprove of Elon Musk.
Business Boom
In a comment to NPR, Hiller, who also works at an aquarium in Hawaii, noted that he listed his first anti-Musk sticker in his online shop MadPufferStickers in 2023. The sticker read, “I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy.” At the time, Hiller noted that Musk was “sort of becoming a bully and sort of pushing disinformation.” While Hiller actually considered buying his own Tesla in the past, Musk’s actions ended up disillusioning him from the company.
“I thought they were very cool. I liked the tech. I liked the fact that they were good for the environment… I mean, some things are more important than just tech, you know, like, I just don’t want to support someone who is so against who I am and what I believe. It was a choice and I didn’t want to be just confused for someone who supported him or agreed with him,” Hiller stated.
The entrepreneur’s sticker business saw a notable boost in recent months, especially following the election of U.S. President Donald Trump. Hiller has since expanded his sticker lineup, with popular ones like “Anti Elon Tesla Club,” “Elon is a dogebag,” and “Elon killed my resale value.” Hiller has sold about 70,000 stickers, magnets, and clings across his online shops on Amazon, Etsy, Redbubble, and eBay so far.
Surprising Clientele
With his business rising, Hiller noted that he has received orders from across the globe, allowing him to reach sales of $100,000 in one month. This was no surprise as Musk has become a controversial figure, not just in the United States but in several countries across Europe as well. When Musk performed his controversial gesture in January alone, Hiller recorded 500 sales in one day.
Most surprisingly, however, some of Hiller’s customers may not necessarily disapprove of Elon Musk’s politics or his involvement with the Trump administration through his work with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Hiller shared a transaction on his Etsy store to NPR, which involved a sticker that was ordered by a father to his son, who lived in Los Angeles.
“Occasionally, I get people on my Etsy store, they buy a sticker as a gift, and then they get to write a little note along with the gift to the recipient. And occasionally I read the notes and I see one that says like, ‘Happy birthday, from dad. This is to protect you on the mean streets of L.A.,’” Hiller noted.
The customer’s note is not surprising considering that Teslas have been subjected to a wave of vandalism attacks from people or activists who are critical of Elon Musk. The Tesla vandalism incidents, as well as Molotov and shooting attacks on Tesla stores, have been condemned by the Trump administration.
Not a Full-Time Gig
Despite his business boom, Hiller noted that he does not intend to leave his aquarium job yet, nor does he intend to sell stickers full-time. Thus, even if the Elon Musk controversies ended tomorrow, the entrepreneur noted that he would be fine.
“If it ended tomorrow, I’m totally fine. You know, I didn’t set out to do this. And it’s certainly not my business plan going forward. I mean, it’s not a really good business plan to bank on a billionaire just annoying people forever,” Hiller stated.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
