Over the past two months, a movement calling itself “Tesla Takedown” has staged hundreds of protests across the U.S., aiming not to change laws or pressure regulators — but to drive down Tesla’s stock price. The movement frames itself as grassroots resistance to Musk’s influence. But its methods and messaging online suggest it may be tied to a coordinated campaign with financial motives.

A Pirate Wires investigation reveals that key Wikipedia articles related to Tesla, Tesla Takedown, and Elon Musk himself, have been edited extensively by accounts that may have ties to the Tesla short-seller movement. Some of these accounts have been reprimanded or blocked for violating neutrality and targeting Musk, yet continue to shape what millions see as objective fact.

I’ve previously reported on how Wikipedia — its lore, PR, and neutral-looking interface — presents a smooth surface that often hides the activities of political or ideological campaigns run by edit gangs or sophisticated pay-to-play agencies. In the case of the article on the Tesla Takedown movement, a confluence of many of these forces appears to be at work. The effect is to present the movement in a light carefully calibrated to meet the demands of an unseen agenda.

The article’s crucial lead section begins with a claim that the effort is a “grassroots” protest movement and ends with the claim that it’s peaceful. The idea slipped in between these two claims is that the Tesla Takedown movement is what it appears to be (“Protesters have organized nonviolent demonstrations at Tesla stores across the United States, Canada, Europe…”). There is no exploration of how the movement, which peaked last month with dozens of protests on a single weekend, is funded. The word “funding” does not appear in the article even once — despite a TechCrunch report tying Tesla Takedown to the Disruption Project, which is funded by far-left mega-fund Tides Advocacy.

The Tesla Takedown article was created on March 2, little over two weeks after the first protests began in the US, by Wikipedia editor Jumplike23, who remains the top contributor to the article in terms of the amount of text added. Jumplike23’s edit history — the account has created dozens of articles on everything from a suburban soccer coach, to a Colombian pharmaceutical employee, a high school football coach, and a Los Angeles anesthesiologist — strongly matches the profile of a “black hat” editor paid to write Wikipedia articles.

Why would someone pay to have a Wikipedia page created about a grassroots protest movement? The activities of QRep2020, the article’s second most active editor by amount of text added and top editor by number of edits made — and the second editor to touch the article after its creation — may point to an answer.

In Wikipedia parlance, QRep2020 is what’s known as an SPA, a single-purpose account. In article after article, QRep2020 has displayed a singular focus: attacking Elon Musk. Its activity centers almost entirely on pages connected to Musk and Tesla, with nearly 400 edits to the “Elon Musk” article alone, most of them highly critical. In one case, the editor added a quote from a Business Insider piece in which a former employee described Musk as exhibiting “total and complete pathological sociopathy.”

A little over three weeks after joining Wikipedia, QRep2020 created the article on TSLAQ, a network of anti-Tesla short sellers, and became its top editor by both number of edits and total content added. It was the first Wikipedia article QRep2020 had ever created. Ten days after launching the TSLAQ article, QRep2020 was blocked for 31 hours for editor warring on a different article, with the admin specifying that they had also been warring on the TSLAQ article.

The warning and block did little to deter the account, which soon returned to skewing Musk-related articles. In one representative edit to the “Tesla” article, QRep2020 replaced a reference to “safety problems” with the more charged phrase “unresolved and dangerous technical problems.” By April 2022, QRep2020’s edits had become so aggressive that a site administrator indefinitely blocked the account from editing the Musk article, writing: “You are adding so much negative material about Elon Musk, it goes beyond WP:UNDUE [giving undue weight to one perspective] to outright violating BLP.” BLP refers to Wikipedia’s rules governing biographies of living persons — some of the site’s strictest content policies. The block was later lifted after QRep2020 promised to scale back their behavior.

None of this went unnoticed by other editors. In 2021, a veteran Wikipedia editor flagged QRep2020’s behavior as a possible conflict of interest: “TSLAQ is the Tesla ticker symbol + ‘Q’... the NASDAQ notation for bankruptcy. The name QRep2020 presumably stands for ‘Q Representative 2020’, which implies undisclosed WP:COI [conflict of interest].” For their part, QRep2020 writes on their user page that creating the TSLAQ article was their “first bit of research into ‘Q Groups’” and that the account has “no position in any Musk owned or related companies or assets (i.e. I am not a short seller).”

The TSLAQ article created by QRep2020 includes a prominent reference to Edward Niedermeyer, an automotive journalist, longtime Tesla critic, and author of a 2019 book highly critical of Musk. Significantly, QRep2020 created both the Wikipedia article on Niedermeyer and the article on his book. QRep2020 was also the first account to upload cover art for the book to Wikipedia.

To call Niedermeyer a critic of Musk is somewhat of an understatement. Niedermeyer got his start in journalism running the “Tesla Death Watch” column at an automotive news outlet in 2008. His commentary on Musk and Tesla frequently goes far beyond journalistic scrutiny and veers into open attack. In 2022, for example, Niedermeyer called Tesla a “confidence game,” contending that Musk’s “dreams are bullshit.’​​” More recently he described Tesla as a “decade-long deadly deception,” and has called the company’s full self-driving feature a “scam” and a “criminal enterprise.”

But Niedermeyer’s attacks against Musk often become unnervingly personal. The day after Musks’s 52nd birthday, Niedermeyer — whose Bluesky profile reads, “cyberbullying elon musk since 2015” — posted on X, “A belated happy birthday to the owner of this website. I hope you get everything you deserve, and I hope you get it good and hard.” Days before, he posted, “We all want a lot of things out of Society, but at this point I’m willing to settle for Elon getting his clavicle broken by a guy who looks like a Mii on live pay per view.”

In February, Niedermeyer emerged as one of Tesla Takedown’s leading voices, promoting the campaign heavily on Bluesky and appearing on YouTube livestreams alongside organizers like Alex Winter and Valerie Coates. His pinned post on Bluesky is a poster for a Tesla Takedown protest. The banner on the account is a graphic that reads “Time to Sell That Fucking Tesla.”

In one of the first Tesla Takedown-related interviews, Niedermeyer made a point that’s core to the TSLAQ movement — the idea that Tesla’s market cap is primarily rooted in Musk’s hype, and not in the value of its product. “What [Elon is] good at is selling investors on the future potential of [his] companies, on getting investors to put a lot of money into them and then escalating that process over and over again,” Niedermeyer told Portland Business Journal “That’s what has created this valuation.”

Two weeks after the interview, Niedermeyer celebrated the creation of the Tesla Takedown article with a thread on Bluesky. “Huge news: #TeslaTakedown has its very own Wikipedia page!” he wrote in the first post in the thread. Niedermeyer continued the thread with a number of posts, including one that stood out — even amid his relentless Musk-sniping — for its brazen admission of what the Wikipedia effort is really all about:

“We are waging an information war, we have the truth on our side, and we just need to make it easy to find…” Niedermeyer wrote in the thread. “Wikipedia articles are one of the best ways to do that! If protesting isn’t your thing, this is a great way to pitch in. Experienced editors are especially helpful. Even 5 minutes/day helps!”

In his celebratory thread, Niedermeyer specified that the Tesla Takedown article also includes “fantastic resources like [the Wikipedia] article ‘Criticism of Tesla, Inc.’,” an article created in January 2021 by an editor called Stonkaments. Like QRep2020, Stonkaments is focused almost exclusively on Musk and Tesla. And notably, less than 24 hours after its creation, it was a familiar figure who made the first edit to the Criticism of Tesla article after its creation: Qrep2020. In fact, after that initial edit, every single one of the subsequent 500 edits was made by Stonkaments and QRep2022, who worked together in a kind of iterative dance, interweaving their edits as they crafted their narrative.

On their Wikipedia user page, Stonkaments links to their X profile, which reveals a feed filled almost exclusively with posts attacking Musk, including extensive retweets of posts by Niedermeyer. The username refers to the Stonks meme, a misspelling of “stocks.” The account’s profile pic is a viral image related to the meme.

Stonkaments’ sentiment towards Musk is hardly less forgiving than that of Niedermeyer. In one instance, Stonkaments retweeted an Alameda County public health notice concerning Tesla during the pandemic with the hashtag #arrestelonmusk. When Musk announced that he would be moving Tesla’s headquarters out of California the account posted another bespoke hashtag: #GoodRiddanceGrifter.

There is very little of the above that does not represent some violation of Wikipedia’s most important content policies. This includes prohibitions on conflict of interest, canvassing (coordinate editing), and, most of all, the site’s core policy of preserving neutrality — what might be understood as the first of Wikipedia’s version of the Ten Commandments: “All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view.”

But none of these policies have been enforced in a way that made even the slightest impact on how the Tesla Takedown-related articles were created and edited. These articles — which, together, are part of an open attack campaign — remain intact with few major changes to the content provided by Jumplike23, QRep2020, Stonkaments, and any sockpuppets accounts they may control.

While we might fault the editors in question, the obvious fault here lies with Wikipedia. While Wikimedia Foundation might argue otherwise, the reality is that nothing has been done regarding an effort to wage “information war” as part of a campaign to tank the price of a stock that accounts for 1.5% of the S&P 500. The likelihood that anyone at Wikipedia — its Arbitration Committee, Board of Trustees, or executive team at Wikimedia Foundation — is even aware of what’s going on here is vanishingly remote.

Meanwhile, WMF continues to dedicate its time, money, and ethos to a raft of politically-aligned ideological causes. Far from being limited to internal initiatives like “DEI-centered software development,” WMF’s energies are focused on funnelling millions of dollars to radical activist NGOs in its ideological orbit. Instead of a steward, WMF has become a pass-through.

Whether Tesla’s stock price goes up or down is, in itself, an issue of little to no concern to anyone who doesn’t own the stock. The issue we all should be concerned about is the ease with which a few determined actors can manipulate our information ecosystem to sway the media and swing markets. It’s clear by this point that Wikipedia is one of the biggest and most widely exploited backdoor vulnerabilities in our information ecosystem. The only question that remains is why Wikimedia Foundation appears intent on doing nothing about it.

— Ashley Rindsberg