Occupy Wall Street stunned the world in 2011 with a two-month encampment in lower Manhattan’s Zucotti Park, during which activists protested economic inequality and corporate greed in the aftermath of the Great Recession. But the ongoing global movement — leaderless by design — was not without internal battles that sometimes spilled onto social media channels crucial to the cause.
On Wednesday, another shot was fired in a long-running dispute between an apparently disaffected former organizer and an Occupy group that has continued to support protests for organized labor, racial justice, and anti-fascist principles. An account on X, formerly Twitter, with the handle @OccupyWallSt and about 160,000 followers, posted for the first time since early 2020, in a rather surprising way: “We shall be the first interplanetary social movement,” the post reads. “Thank you and @SpaceX and @elonmusk for carrying our legacy to the stars.” The post includes a photo of women in SpaceX “Occupy Mars” shirts that appears on the Wikipedia page for the company, alongside a picture of Musk in a shirt with the same slogan.
Praise for the world’s richest man, who just spent a quarter of a billion dollars to help re-elect Donald Trump and gain influence in Washington D.C. to further line his pockets, is not exactly in line with the Occupy ethos. Replies to the revived account ranged from the bewildered to the outraged. Some users speculated that Musk himself had seized control of the handle as a trollish joke.
But, according to the activists who run the accounts @OccupyWallStNYC on X, Occupy Wall St. on Facebook, and Occupy Wall St. on Bluesky, the fawningly pro-Musk comment was authored by Justine Tunney, a software engineer who made significant technical contributions to the original Occupy actions — including its primary website — and went on to work for Google. Tunney had a very public split from the group in 2014, when she wrested control of the @OccupyWallSt handle on Twitter and used it to criticize other notable figures in the movement. That same year, she made headlines with a petition calling on President Barack Obama to resign and appoint Eric Schmidt, then chairman of Google, “CEO of America.”
Tunney insists that the endorsement of Musk was sincere. “While our occupation was eventually destroyed, its spirit continues to live on in all who share our dream of earning freedom by building autonomous spaces,” she tells Rolling Stone. “For that reason, Occupy Wall Street fully supports Elon Musk’s vision of establishing a sovereign self-governing settlement on Mars. It also saddens us that the world’s most successful man believes it’s only possible by going to a different planet.” (Micah Bornfree, né White, often credited as a co-founder of Occupy, formerly had access to the @OccupyWallSt account but tells Rolling Stone in an email that he has not used it in years and does not know the current password.)
A current administrator of the Occupy pages that have remained active in recent years, who requested anonymity, says that Tunney was one of her “best friends” from the encampment. “She’s a tech genius, like a legit genius,” this activist says. “And one of the reasons why Occupy went worldwide is because of some of the work that she did.” She recalls that Tunney was the one to set up a 1-800 number that fed to many different participants, ensuring that reporters could always get someone on the record, which kept Occupy in the media spotlight.
But this activist also says that Tunney, who is transgender and worked on Occupy projects with a team of other trans women, was bullied by the “white, suburban, normie guys” flocking to downtown New York for the protest. That, she says, led to Tunney’s gradual alienation. By 2013, Tunney was being quoted in a Nation article about people who had drifted away from the cause, and said that Occupy had been reduced to “bickering on mailing lists.” The piece noted that she would sometimes jump into these debates with “an act of provocative trolling or a treatise denouncing the folly of consensus.”
Tunney’s friend assumes the Musk post is another bit of trolling. “Because she’s a programmer, she understands that any tweet that tags him on Twitter will automatically be elevated in the algorithm, because he owns the company, and that’s the kind of shit he’s been doing,” she speculates. It may have been an act of frustration, she adds, explaining that Tunney “also believes that the left isn’t progressing anywhere, which is not untrue.”
The administrators of @OccupyWallStNYC have disavowed the post and blasted a Newsweek article about it — which bears the headline “Occupy Wall Street Returns. Now Supports Elon Musk” — as “fake news,” attributing the Musk comment to Tunney alone. They have also attempted to contact Tunney.
Whether or not the feud goes any further, it’s a testament to the lasting intensities and passions that came out of the Occupy uprising almost 15 years ago. And equating a wave of populist protests with Musk’s ambition of colonizing a neighboring planet is certainly one way to stir the pot. The intended message, however, seems to be lost on the 99 percent.