Anti-Tesla protests are being fueled by a Democratic mega-donor — whose ex-husband is one of Elon Musk’s closest pals.
Billionaire Steve Jurvetson, 58, was an early investor in Tesla, served on its board until December 2020 and continues to sit on Musk’s SpaceX board. However, his ex-wife, California psychiatrist Karla Jurvetson, 58, doled out more than $500,000 to Indivisible Action, a political action group linked to a nonprofit directing the protests against Musk, according to public records.
Indivisible, a Washington-based advocacy group, is sponsoring “Musk or Us” demonstrations across the country this week. The group offers a “toolkit” on its website featuring graphics and anti-Tesla protest signs as well as information about how to conduct town halls.
Its website states: “Support the massive organizing effort it’s going to take to defend our democracy and one another against Trump’s authoritarian agenda.”
The group stands against Musk and his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an initiative to streamline the federal bureaucracy.
“Republicans are enabling Musk to make decisions and push policies that directly hurt working families while enriching billionaires like himself,” the group said on its website.
“We cannot allow Republicans to abandon their responsibility to uphold our constitution and serve their constituents in order to curry favor with Musk.”
Some protesters have vandalized Tesla vehicles and facilities across the country, with fires set and showrooms spray-painted.
Karla Jurvetson is known in Northern California as something of a Democratic mega-donor. In addition to Indivisible, she gave more than $9.5 million to Democratic progressive candidates, including former New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who lost his re-election bid last year, and Minnesota’s Rep. Ilhan Omar. She also donated more than $100,000 to Kamala Harris’ Victory Fund in 2023.
The Stanford-educated psychiatrist and mother of two married Jurvetson in 1990, filing for divorce in 2016, according to court records. A year later, Steve quit his venture capital firm, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, after it began an investigation into his romantic relationships with multiple women at the company.
“An internal investigation conducted by Draper Fisher Jurvetson … found that Jurvetson had affairs with multiple women at the same time,” said a report in Recode, a tech news website. “The women, who work in the tech industry, met him at professional conferences.”
The women discovered Jurvetson’s alleged duplicity at a TED conference in Vancouver in March 2015, according to Recode.
In a Facebook post on November 14, 2017, Jurvetson denied the allegations.
“Wholly false allegations about sexual predation and workplace harassment,” he said. “Let me be perfectly clear: no such allegations are true.
“I think my personal life, and other people’s personal lives, should stay personal,” Jurvetson continued. “It should not be in the court of public opinion. This is the last I will say on this subject for the foreseeable future.” Jurvetson remarried at the end of 2018, the same year he founded his new firm, Future Ventures.
Although both Jurvetsons supported the Democratic Party, Karla Jurvetson emerged as one of the most prolific donors to Democratic women in politics during the 2020 election cycle.
She donated nearly $15 million to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and in 2018 she doled out $30 million to the Emily’s List PAC, which supports pro-abortion candidates.
Steve Jurvetson has his own left-leaning charity alongside his new wife, the Jurvetson Foundation.
He also continues to support Musk.
“The best investment I ever made — buying a Tesla for everyone in my family and at Future Ventures,” Jurvetson posted on X last week.
“Too precious to trust to anything but the safest car … especially for my co-founder who finally abandoned her motorcycle!”
Jurvetson has held important roles with Musk, helping to bail the billionaire out in 2008 when he was running out of cash to support Tesla and SpaceX.
“He’s really an American hero, more than anyone I’ve ever met,” Steve Jurvetson told Business Insider in 2012. “I was a believer all along.”
Neither Karla nor Steve Jurvetson returned The Post’s calls for comment.
