Graffiti has always been a popular means of protest, with paint and stickers being cheap and easy to apply. No stranger to funny and beautiful street art, Baltimore has seen a spike in graffiti and street art protesting Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The alliance between the Tesla CEO and the president was controversial even before Elon started doing Nazi salutes on stage. With federal funding cuts and freezes from DOGE now posing a threat to low-income families in Baltimore and the U.S., seeing more art protests is no surprise. On the bright side for Baltimore, some of the anti-Musk graffiti is pretty funny.
Cave Painting Graffiti Mocks Elon in Baltimore
Flashing Nazi salutes? Retweeting white supremacists on X? Backing Germany’s far-right AfD party? Musk has done all of the above, yet Nazism is only one problem that many Baltimore residents have with the billionaire. As apparent head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Musk led what amounts to a hostile takeover of the U.S. Treasury, potentially jeopardizing the private information of countless Americans. Of course, there’s also the issue of how he amassed the greatest fortune on earth.
Reddit user u/Taxitaxitaxi33 shared a post compiling some highlights of Baltimore’s anti-Musk art, garnering over 5k likes. It’s obvious from the comment section that Tesla and the Cybertruck have drawn plenty of criticism of their own. Among the other pieces of Baltimore graffiti protesting Musk and Tesla, there are no less than two imitation cave paintings showing hunters surrounding a Cybertruck with spears. “The Swasticar hunt cave art is fantastic,” said one commenter.
Another piece, depicting Super Mario Bros. character Luigi holding a gun in one hand and Wario’s severed head in the other, had its own supporters. Tensions around health care were running high in the U.S. long before the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. As one commenter said,
The Luigi /Waluigi one is inspired
Paintings, stickers, billboards, and other forms of graffiti are a time-honored means of expressing dissent. Graffiti doesn’t show the strength of one’s side the way that a march or rally does. Rather, it shows that quiet voices from invisible mouths are still speaking the words that the city needs to hear. Baltimore always was creative.
