Every weekend in recent months, Mike Ignatowski has gone to one of the two Tesla dealers in Austin, Texas, to protest against Elon Musk, Tesla’s executive director and the most famous transplant to the most tense city of the state.
Not long ago, Mr. Ignatowski, a 67 -year -old computer engineer, was an admirer of Mr. Musk, before Musk aligned with President Trump. Now Mr. Ignatowski waves a sign of “Fire Elon” the duration of the protests, just when he has marched, he is not very crazy with the Blue Model 3 Tsla that he bought “before knowing that Elon was crazy”, since his bumper sticker extends.
This is how it goes in the capital of Texas, where the sharp right change of Mr. Musk has been received with a mixture of anger and agony that moves hair. Austin’s conflicting feelings reflect both the economic influence of the multi -million dollar entrepreneur in the city and the broader transformation of the city of a medium -sized university city around the state capitol to a technology fed with technology and a steel and a steel.
T -shirts dyed tie still urge residents to “keep Austin weird”, mainly in hotels and tourist stores. But a different child of counterculture has tasks that are directed in the midst of an influx of determined figures of centers (including Mr. Musk), self -denominated free booksellers (such as the Podcasters Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman), and conservatives). Already in the city was the theorist of the resident conspiracy of Austin, Alex Jones, and his extreme right infowars. There is even a new opposite institution of higher education that seeks to compete with the University of Texas in Austin, the University of Austin.
Strange, perhaps, but not on the path of the old bumper pattering mantra.
“If you say ‘keep Austin strange’ to someone under 40, they would think about that as an ancient slogan, like your old shoppe,” said Hw Brands, historian of the University of Texas. “He has no resonance for his lived experience of Austin.”
The transformation of the city followed a deliberate project of decades to attract technology companies to their hills.
“I am someone who thinks he has changed for better,” said Gary Farmer, who helped attract new businesses as founding president of Opportunity Texas, an economic development group. “The culinary arts, the performing arts, the visual arts, the music scene, everything is better.”
At the same time, housing prices have shot themselves, and the population, and the whitest among the big cities of Texas, has thrown part of its diversity.
In 2023, more people moved from Austin’s travis county that moved, and the proportion of Hispanic residents in Austin decreased even when in all Texas, the Hispanic population has become a plurality. Black families have also left Austin’s leg, said Lila Valencia, the demography of the city.
The greatest increase in new residents has been among homes that earn more than $ 200,000 per year, which grew by 70 percent between 2019 and 2023, Valencia said. The proportion of homes that earn below $ 100,000 per year decreased.
Austin now has about 100 accredited private schools, more than double the 39 he had two decades ago. Registration in the city’s public schools has been falling.
For years, the locals resisted development, in vain.
“They were building many highways in Houston and Dallas, and Austin rejected that money,” said Tyson Tuttle, former executive director of Silicon Labs, who moved to Austin in 1992. Anyway. “
Many in the new Austin elite have broken into the progressive policies of the city government and the county about issues such as homeless and surveillance. Last year, some of them, including Mr. Musk, supported a main challenger to the local Democratic District prosecutor, José Garza. In an email from the entire company, Mr. Musk encouraged Tesla employees to vote in support of the Challenger.
Mr. Garza won primary school by a margin of two to one.
“If an asteroid fell from heaven and hit a Democratic candidate at a position in Travis County and kill that person, that person’s body would be defeated a live Republican,” said Evan Smith, a former Texas Tribe Pavilion.
Even so, the city’s demographic transformation has led many to regret their identity that vanishes as a place of street streets and a candidate for mayor of cross and homeless faces. Austin Chronicle, an alternative weekly newspaper, even sells a shirt that reads “Rip Old Austin”.
Earlier this year, passers -by stopped to listen to an performance on IMPOMPPT Street at Congress Avenue, such as the old days, except that the guitarist was the Ted Ngent friendly with Trump, and his appearance had been organized by hard Republicans.
Almost common are complaints about the plaintiffs.
“I am not one of those detractors about Austin who say that everything was better in the old days,” said Terry Lickona, who for 50 years has produced “Austin City Limits”, a public television program for local and national musicians. He added: “Austin has always attracted outstanding characters,” including Willie Nelson and Michael Dell, the computer manufacturer.
The struggles in Tesla, where the profits have fallen abruptly since Musk lined up closely with Mr. Trump, could directly affect the city. At the same time, Austin will be the test field for his next major company: Tesla Autonomous Taxis, which Musk promised for June.
Mr. Musk did not respond to an interview request.
“Having Tesla here is a great benefit to the city,” said Tuttle, who recently found an artificial intelligence startup. “I would like Elon to return home and concentrate on his business.”
The arrival of Mr. Musk and Tesla five years ago was a key moment for the city, scoring a transformation of years that was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Many people, including dissatisfied celebrities and Californians whose policy was changing in the midst of blockages, sought the relative opening of Texas.
“It is, as, most of the good things and very little of bad things,” Rogan said a 2021 interview with Mr. Adler, months after moving there.
The results have been a slight moderation of the city’s policy and tensions about Mr. Musk among those who hate their actions in Washington and those who love their role as a technology entrepreneur.
The city “attracts people who are on all sides of the problems,” said Joshua Baer, the founder of Capital Factory, which helps to finance and nourish new technology companies. “My world is generally fans and followers of Elon.”
On a recent night, more than two boxes of the Austinitas convince in a church meeting room adorned with colorful Inc and Writing messages for a resistin resistin meeting, which organizes protests against Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump in the Tesla dealerships.
“Our mission is the non -violent legal resistance of the authoritarian,” said Ian Crowl, an organizer, to the group, which included retirees, technological workers and graduate students. “If you want to throw a rock into a Tesla,” he added, “that’s not what we do here.”
Such tensions also have a leg in the minds of Tesla drivers in Austin. Vikki Goodwin, a democratic state representative, said he tries to be “invisible” when driving in his. When a car got in it in the light of the stop recently, he worried that he could have been intentional.
“Oh, my God,” said Goodwin, thought: “Is anger that made him lead to my car?”
The driver, in fact, was using his wife’s car with gasoline, Mrs. Goodwin said she said, and assumed that she would decrease rapidly when she removed her foot from the gas pedal, as her tesla does.