One Protester Got Her City to Divest from Elon Musk — Here's What She Can Teach the Rest of Us
A California retiree gathered signatures, built a coalition, and got her town to cut ties. Here's how she did it.
It’s June 14, 2025, and you’re at a No Kings protest in the farming town of Woodland, California — one of more than 4,000 people who’ve turned out to march from the new courthouse to the old one. You’re angry. You’ve watched Elon Musk pour nearly $290 million into electing Donald Trump. You’ve watched him back far-right extremists in Germany. You’ve watched DOGE tear through the federal government. Maybe you have a Tesla sitting in a driveway that you’re suddenly hell-bent on selling. You’re holding a sign, you’re chanting, and it feels good, but somewhere in the back of your mind is the question that haunts every protest: what does this actually change?
Then a woman with bangs, glasses, and long grey hair steps in front of you holding a clipboard. She’s friendly. She’s direct. She wants to know if you’ll sign a petition calling your county and its cities to cut every financial tie to Musk’s companies. She doesn’t have a table. She came to you. There are 15 or 20 other people fanning out through the crowd with their own clipboards.
That petition-gathering woman, Cath Posehn, told me later that she got an incredibly consistent response on that June day from every protester she approach: “Hell yeah.”
Posehn is a retired foundation director. She is not a professional organizer. But she’d like you to know that you’re wrong about something — that persistent feeling that the handful of companies propping up the stock market while taking a rightward political turn is too powerful, too embedded, too inevitable to fight. Because on February 18, 2026, the Davis City Council voted 4-1 to pass the resolution she and her team drafted, severing the city’s engagement with nearly every company Musk controls — Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink, xAI, The Boring Company, and Tesla Robotaxis. No new contracts. No new purchases. No Musk platforms in official city communications. The resolution also formally calls on CalPERS — the largest public pension fund in the nation, holding roughly $2 billion in Tesla stock — to divest. The only carve-out: Starlink stays as an emergency backup when the power goes out — a reminder of how thoroughly Musk’s empire is woven into the infrastructure of daily life.
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Posehn’s galvanizing moment was the one millions of people had. “A lot of people bought Teslas for a lot of good, generous reasons,” she told me. “But his politics had shifted. His rhetoric got increasingly bad when he started supporting far-right German influences.” Posehn has lived in Yolo County for 40 years. Her job involved moving donations to the places they could make a difference. She was a volunteer on the PTA, and once got 90 community groups together for a Week Without Violence event back in the 1990s. She has learned in her life that local government is small enough to move. “I’ve really seen how one person getting involved can make a big difference. This seemed like something tangible that we could do.”
The Divest Musk Yolo campaign’s tactics were methodical. Posehn’s team contacted every elected official privately — every council member, every county supervisor — before ever attending a public meeting. “We wanted to make sure that we had the votes before we took it there.” And they didn’t rely on a moral argument, they made a practical one, sending ahead a detailed backgrounder cataloging Tesla’s 48 OSHA citations, environmental violations, and a stock price wildly disconnected from financial reality. They drafted a resolution so officials had something concrete to respond to. And they asked each one: would you introduce this?
Then came the clipboards — at No Kings rallies, Pride festivals, Tesla Takedowns — walking into crowds rather than waiting. Over 1,700 handwritten signatures. “Never let go of your signatures,” Posehn told me. “Make copies for people, but don’t let go of them — you might need to show them again.” She pulled in Indivisible Yolo as a co-sponsor. Then came a flood of other organizations: NorCal Resist, the Yolo Interfaith Immigration Network, Tesla Takedown, and Stop the Money Pipeline.
Davis now joins a growing list of jurisdictions cutting ties with Musk. Charlotte barred new Teslas from its fleet. Lehigh County halted Tesla pension investments. When Sweden’s national pension fund blacklisted the company and sold its $1.2 billion stake, Denmark and the Netherlands soon followed. Posehn isn’t done — she’s now pushing CalPERS directly, which in March agreed to put together a report on its Tesla holdings for review.
Here’s what Posehn tells anyone interested in following her playbook: Find the groups in your community where allies gather — Indivisible chapters, labor councils, protest networks. Show up, give a three-minute pitch, bring clipboards. “If there was somebody at that meeting that seemed fired up, I put a star next to their name and reminded myself to go talk to that person later.” Build your team. Research your city’s contracts. Draft a resolution. Meet privately with every official before going public. “Talk to the people most likely to be supportive first — save the harder ones for later, after you’ve had a little practice.” Then fill the room when it’s time to vote.
Standing alone at a protest, it’s easy to forget that one person's name on a line becomes a thousand, and a thousand signatures become a crucial vote on a board of supervisors or a city council. Posehn proved that the distance between a single angry protester and an official act of government is shorter than most people think — if someone's willing to walk into the crowd and close it.