The Boycott the Billionaires

The Boycott of the Billionaires must grow to protect the climate!

People Power in Action

Residents in the US and Europe have already begun voting-by-boycott against the super rich, starting with Elon Musk, once adored as the “renewable saviour”. Now, in almost every country where his Teslas were once sold, people are spontaneously voting with a no, thank you. Canadians threatened with tariffs have retaliated with boycotts of American goods, including Teslas, and the boycott encourages the consumption of Canadian, locally-produced goods. The boycotts here are not organized, not pre-planned, but almost spontaneous, individual, and they’re growing. People are angry, are following their instincts, and are using their power.

It is now up to us to build on these personal boycotts and encourage people to turn them into a broader, more powerful boycott to save the climate by attacking billionaires and patriarchs where it counts. Why is the time ripe?

Any giant business is vulnerable to boycotts. Businesses do not like sales disruptions, as much as we do not like climate change. Boycotts disrupt availability and draw attention to costs. Boycotts encourage us to question the affordability of goods (or even whether we really need those goods). Boycotts spread like wildfire.

Boycotts shake business financial reports quickly. Tesla's sales declines across Germany, Sweden, France, Norway, China are enormous, reflected in a stock fall from $346 per share, when Elon Musk became “US president pro tem”, to $248 per share at present (March 2025) in about 60 days. The President turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom as NBC news described was a desperate attempt to shore up sales. President Trump would then join in and attack “the Radical Left Lunatics”, who are trying to “illegally and collusively boycott Tesla.”

Source: Yahoo Finance

Boycotts of billionaire-oligarchs offer us an opening that exposes the whole charade of “drill baby drill”. The oligarchs want gas and oil and their pure profits. The current US Administration, and other political groups internationally, seek to resuscitate fossil fuels under the claim that fossil fuels are “not a problem”, a most egregious and monumental lie. As oil and gas continue to cause great damage and loss to our environment and to humanity, they will also confirm that climate change is a threat multiplier, a term referring to how climate change effects interact to create wide and dangerous destabilization and security risks, such as military conflicts and violence, which in turn inspire the quest for minerals and metals and oil and gas. If the Middle East did not have stores of gas and oil, how would history look there?

Unusual but fully justified, the current boycotts of the billionaires are happening naturally without much planning and organizing, confirming that boycotters have the potential to cause great, beneficial effect. Zoe Gardner, UK organizer of the Stop Trump Coalition, notes that much happening is coming about “organically” on Tik Tok. Swedes are so outraged that since late January 2025, 80 000 citizens have joined one boycott group, hoping to reduce food imports from the US. Interestingly, Sweden was, unlike Canada, hoping to become the 51st state of the US, until Trump showed his colors. Now they are outraged.

Billionaires are averting their eyes from climate change, an inflation driver and cost multiplier. The latter causes crop losses and higher food prices. Recent increases in coffee prices in Brazil and cacao prices in Africa are attributable to climate change. Price increases for orange juice are partly attributable to climate change, as with olive oil. Rising temperatures, droughts and irregular rainfall, pests, and diseases will continue to affect food production. The oligarchs should assume part of the blame because they are making no effort to promote renewable energies, starting with Elon Musk, who once did promote them. Instead, oligarchs are allied to power gas and oil interests. In a further step, driven by oligarch complicity, these higher food prices will not just increase inflationary pressures, but push interest rates higher and hurt economies.

What does the global climate movement need to do? Here are six tips to take away.

Join the boycott movement to end dependence on fossil fuels. Target not all the big fish or oligarchs as a group, but one company at a time. Amazon appears to perhaps be the most vulnerable. This singular focus is a training ground for broadening the boycott later.

Plan long-term in an organized way. Remember how long the grape boycott ran in California in order to unite farmworkers. Persistent focus on this is a boycott against oligarchs running the world who have no ounce of concern for fossil fuel excesses.

Plan in a sustained, informational way. Expose how these oligarchs carefully plan to systematically misinform you. They are not merely saying that “fossil fuel is a problem”. Consider that Musk runs X; Zuckerberg, Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp); and Bezos, the Washington Post, which is slowly becoming a new mouthpiece of a political class based on limitless enrichment.

Focus on climate change as a cost multiplier because fossil fuel emissions threaten our entire food supply, threaten clean water supplies, create weather extremes such as flooding and heat fluctuation, and promote an onslaught of attacks that hurt working people, starting with their pocket books.

Position the boycott at your local level to stop climate change—to demonstrate that we are the ones that must resist, and that resistance means sustained organizing at our grassroots, against fossil fuels, which are killers.

Encourage local citizens in small towns or big cities to decide how they want to take on the oligarchs and their climate denial. Avoid a top-down strategy, but do utilize the profound power of your grassroots movement.

We invite you to look at the attached petition (here in draft form) https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/billionaireboycott/ and to make suggestions to improve it, to make it easier to be customized by boycotters into an organizing tool to target specific billionaires you want to boycott, to drain the swamp, to promote climate justice.