Each weekend for the past few months, Mike Ignatowski has gone to one of two Tesla dealerships in Austin, Texas, to protest Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and the most famous transplant to the state’s most left-leaning city.
Not too long ago, Mr. Ignatowski, a 67-year-old computer engineer, was an admirer of Mr. Musk — before Mr. Musk aligned himself with President Trump. Now Mr. Ignatowski waves a “Fire Elon” sign during the protests, even as he conceded he’s not quite mad enough to part with the blue Model 3 Tesla that he bought “before we knew Elon was crazy,” as his bumper sticker attests.
That’s how it goes in Texas’ capital, where Mr. Musk’s sharp rightward shift has been received with a mix of anger and hair-pulling agony. Austin’s conflicted feelings reflect both the billionaire entrepreneur’s economic influence on the city and the city’s broader transformation from a medium-sized college town arranged around the State Capitol to a tech-fueled metropolis with a glass-and-steel skyline and a changing image.
Tie-dyed T-shirts still urge residents to “Keep Austin Weird,” mostly in hotels and tourist shops. But a different kind of counterculture has taken root amid an influx of decidedly right-of-center figures (including Mr. Musk), self-described freethinkers (like the podcasters Joe Rogan and Lex Fridman), and conservative entrepreneurs (like Joe Lonsdale). Already in town was Austin’s resident conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, and his far-right Infowars. There’s even a new, contrarian institution of higher learning looking to compete with the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Austin.
Weird, perhaps, but not in the way of the old bumper-sticker mantra.
“If you say ‘Keep Austin Weird’ to somebody under the age of 40, they would think of that as an antique-y slogan, like Ye Old Shoppe,” said H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas. “It doesn’t have any resonance for their lived experience of Austin.”
The city’s transformation followed a deliberate, decades-long project to attract technology companies to its rolling hills.
“I’m one who thinks it has changed for the better,” said Gary Farmer, who helped attract new businesses as the founding chairman of Opportunity Texas, an economic development group. “The culinary arts, the performing arts, the visual arts, the music scene — it’s all better.”
At the same time, housing prices have skyrocketed, and the population — already the whitest among big cities in Texas — has shed some of its diversity.
In 2023, more people moved out of Austin’s Travis County than moved in, and the share of Hispanic residents in Austin declined even as across all of Texas, the Hispanic population has grown to become a plurality. Black families have also been leaving Austin, said Lila Valencia, the city’s demographer.
The biggest increase in new residents has been among households making more than $200,000 a year, which grew by 70 percent from 2019 to 2023, Ms. Valencia said. The share of households making below $100,000 a year declined.
Austin now has about 100 accredited private schools, more than double the 39 it had two decades ago. Enrollment in the city’s public schools has been falling.
For years, locals resisted development, to no avail.
“They were building a lot of freeways in Houston and Dallas, and Austin turned away that money,” said Tyson Tuttle, the former chief executive of Silicon Labs, who moved to Austin in 1992. “They were saying, if we don’t build it, they won’t come. And they came anyway.”
Many in Austin’s new elite have chafed at the progressive policies in city and county government over issues such as homelessness and policing. Last year, some of them, including Mr. Musk, backed a primary challenger to the local Democratic district attorney, José Garza. In a companywide email, Mr. Musk encouraged Tesla employees to vote in support of the challenger.
Mr. Garza won the primary by a two-to-one margin.
“If an asteroid fell from the sky and hit a Democratic candidate for office in Travis County and killed that person, that person’s corpse would still beat a live Republican,” said Evan Smith, a former leader of the Texas Tribune, an Austin-based nonprofit news site.
Still, the city’s demographic transformation has led many to lament its fading identity as a place of street buskers and a cross-dressing, homeless mayoral candidate. The Austin Chronicle, an alternative weekly newspaper, even sells a shirt that reads “R.I.P. Old Austin.”
Earlier this year, passers-by stopped to listen to an impromptu street performance on Congress Street, like old times, except the guitarist was the Trump-friendly Ted Nugent, and his appearance had been organized by hard-right Republicans.
Almost as common are complaints about the complainers.
“I’m not one of those naysayers about Austin who say it was all better in the old days,” said Terry Lickona, who for 50 years has produced “Austin City Limits,” a public television showcase for local and national musicians. He added, “Austin has always attracted outsized characters,” including Willie Nelson and Michael Dell, the computer maker.
The struggles at Tesla, where profits have dropped sharply since Mr. Musk began closely aligning himself with Mr. Trump, could directly affect the city. At the same time, Austin is set to be the proving ground for his next big venture: self-driving Tesla taxis, which Mr. Musk promised for June.
Mr. Musk did not respond to an interview request.
“Having Tesla here is a huge benefit to the city,” said Mr. Tuttle, who has recently founded an artificial intelligence startup. “I wish that Elon would come home and focus on his business.”
The arrival of Mr. Musk and Tesla five years ago was a key moment for the city, punctuating a yearslong transformation that was accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic. Many people, including celebrities and dissatisfied Californians whose politics were shifting amid the lockdowns, sought out the relative openness of Texas.
“It’s, like, most of the good stuff and very little of the bad stuff,” Mr. Rogan said during a 2021 interview with Mr. Adler, months after moving there.
The result has been a slight moderation of the city’s politics and tensions over Mr. Musk between those who hate his actions in Washington and those who love his role as a technology entrepreneur.
The city “attracts people that are on all sides of issues,” said Joshua Baer, the founder of the Capital Factory, which helps finance and nurture technology startups. “My world is generally Elon fans and supporters.”
On a recent evening, more than two dozen Austinites convened in a church meeting room adorned with colorful messages of inclusivity for a gathering of Resist Austin, which organizes protests against Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump at Tesla dealerships.
“Our mission is lawful nonviolent resistance of authoritarians,” Ian Crowl, an organizer, said to the group, which included retirees, tech workers and graduate students. “If you want to throw a rock at a Tesla,” he added, “that’s not what we’re doing here.”
Such tensions have been on the mind of Tesla drivers in Austin as well. Vikki Goodwin, a Democratic state representative, said she tries to be “invisible” when driving around in hers. When a car rammed into her at a stop light recently, she worried it might have been intentional.
“Oh my God,” Ms. Goodwin said she thought, “is it anger that caused him to drive into my car?”
The driver, in fact, was using his wife’s gas-powered car, Ms. Goodwin said he told her, and he assumed it would slow down quickly when he took his foot off the gas pedal — like his Tesla does.
