One designer in Hawaii has turned Tesla owners' conflicted feelings around Elon Musk into a side hustle, making over $100,000 a month.
Some owners of Tesla $(TSLA)$ electric vehicles who are upset about the cars' association with company CEO Musk, but who are perhaps unable or unwilling to sell their vehicles, have been turning to another way of expressing themselves: statement-making bumper stickers.
Bumper stickers that are critical of Musk and his role as head of the Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, aka DOGE, have taken off in popularity over the past few months. And Matthew Hiller, 47, is one person who is taking advantage of that boom.
Hiller had already been selling stickers on Etsy $(ETSY)$, Amazon $(AMZN)$ and eBay $(EBAY)$ as a side hustle. He started selling Tesla-themed stickers in January 2023, and now ones with phrases like "I bought this before Elon went crazy" have become bestsellers. On some days, he sells $4,500 worth of the anti-Musk merch.
Hiller's inspiration stemmed from his own mixed feelings while shopping for a Tesla in 2023. He'd been in the market for one of Musk's EVs but said all of the "noise" around the Tesla CEO buying Twitter in October 2022 changed his mind. "I made the decision to not support this guy," Hiller said, "and thought there had to be more people watching this unfold like me who had already bought a Tesla and wanted to distance themselves from him."
So Hiller added one anti-Musk sticker to his Etsy store, where the aquarium worker was making and selling stickers featuring blobfish and pufferfish along with funny messages. The sales of the anti-Musk stickers steadily took off.
"This was purely organic," Hiller said. "I'm gonna make this sticker, I didn't see it on the market, I didn't know how people would ever find it on a fish-sticker Etsy store. A few months in, I started getting found on the search engines, some social media posts, [and] it just took off."
Hiller said he is grossing well into six figures per month from sales of his stickers, which go for $6 to $10 each, mostly via Amazon. "The last 30 days, just Amazon was $89,000," he said. "And then add Etsy and eBay on top, it's considerable."
And while some days he sees bigger search interest in his MadPufferStickers online stores, he said there have been a few massive spikes in sales and site traffic off of news stories around Musk and President Donald Trump.
"The moment [Musk] went on stage with Trump for the first time, that was a big moment. Interest picked up there," Hiller said. "And the day after Trump won [the election], another huge chunk of sales. And then [Musk's controversial ] salute around the inauguration. That is what changed it from 300 [sticker sales] a day to 500 a day, overnight."
A bumper sticker protesting Tesla CEO Elon Musk on a Tesla vehicle in California.Photo: Getty Images
While six figures in one month is a nice chunk of change, Miller notes there are plenty of fees that cut into his profits, as any online seller of goods can attest.
Amazon's seller fees can include a 15% transaction fee as well as closing fees and fulfillment fees - although listing an item is free. Etsy charges 20 cents to list an item on a quarterly basis, plus a 6.5% transaction fee and a 3% payment-processing fee, along with an optional advertising fee. And eBay has a 13.6% final-value fee, fees for auctions and an option to pay to have an item advertised.
In addition to the fees, sellers like Hiller also need to purchase their own supplies and pay their own shipping costs, in many cases.
Despite his recent success, Hiller said he "definitely won't quit" his day job at an aquarium in Honolulu. He doesn't have any immediate plans to expand on his newfound business success, he told MarketWatch, but he is mulling creating sticker designs for future viral news-related events as they pop up.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk's involvement with DOGE and his other political endeavors have been followed by a string of vandalism against Tesla EVs and by protests at Tesla showrooms throughout the country. This weekend, "Tesla Takedown" protests are scheduled to take place in cities across the globe and in dozens of states, including Nevada, Indiana, Virginia, New Jersey and California.
Some Tesla and Cybertruck owners, meanwhile, have gone a step beyond merely slapping a sticker on the back of their vehicles.
One Tesla owner in Washington state bought badges of rival EV maker Rivian $(RIVN)$ on Amazon, put them on magnets and stuck them on the back of his Cybertruck, in hopes that people who see his vehicle would note that he doesn't align with Tesla and Musk.
Since the 2024 presidential election, shares of Tesla have shown heightened volatility. The stock is down more than 40% over the last three months, but it is still up 51% over the last 12 months.