— the brake (@TheBrakeNet) May 10, 2024 Tesla CEO Elon Musk tried to minimize the protest on Friday, calling reports “fake news,” though it’s not entirely clear what he was calling fake. “This is fake news. Protesters did not manage to break through the fenceline,” Musk said on X, though nobody had claimed a fence was broken. “There are still 2 intact fence lines all around. Note, this is ‘National Protest Week’ in Germany, so there are a lot of protests for many different reasons,” he continued. An anarchist group called Volcano Group took credit for cutting power to the German Tesla plant back in March. But it’s not clear whether Friday’s protests accomplished anything quite so tangible. Video posted to X by an account called The Brake appears to show hundreds of people, many of them dressed in black, running toward the factory. Photos from the Associated Press show signs that read “Stop Tesla, Water is Life” and “End Neocolonialism.” But the most colorful banner, which is available in the slideshow, reads “Elon du Lachs verpiss dich zum Mars!” which apparently means something close to “Elon, you salmon, fuck off to Mars!” Either that or “Elon, you dick…” We don’t speak German, but crowdsourcing a translation on Bluesky yielded a surprising variety of answers and explanations. Click through the slideshow for more photos from today’s protests in Germany.