New York’s flagship Fifth Avenue Apple Store was spray-painted by climate change protesters, calling for a boycott of the company.
Three slogans were sprayed onto the glass frontage of the store, with Extinction Rebellion accusing Apple of hypocrisy on environmental issues …
Three messages were sprayed onto the glass panes of the iconic storefront:
- (Apple logo) Boycott
- Dump Trump, Apple!
- Tim + Trump = Toxic
While a group of protestors were present and chanting, all the vandalism appears to have been done by a single individual, who was quickly arrested at the scene. What appear to be Apple security staff were seen cleaning off the paint, with the “Tim” name the first thing to be removed.
Extinction Rebellion (XR) said that Apple was guilty of hypocrisy by citing its own environmental credentials while its CEO made a donation to Trump, and the company remained silent on the US pulling out of the Paris Agreement on limiting carbon emissions.
“In 2023, Tim Cook called combating climate change one of the most urgent priorities of our time. Fast forward to 2025, and he’s donating to Trump—the man leading the charge to roll back all climate progress. They’ve betrayed their customers and the planet at the most critical moment in human history,” said XR spokesperson Miles Grant.
Top comment by Ian Grant
Some of these "climate protests" are baffling. What is supposed to be achieved by vandalizing a building? Or tossing paint or what-have-you at classic paintings? I get that they're nothing but performative, and that they represent an achievable goal (after all, it's appears to be easy to vandalize something of value), but what do these people hope to achieve? Outrage? Anger? Sure. But It won't be at the climate deniers or fossil fuel industries - it'll be solely against the vandals!
One thing I do know is that "awareness" is not one of the accomplishments of these acts. It never is. Because act becomes the thing, not the message. "I tossed paint onto the Apple Store because of climate change" is not a message that resonates with, or is generally perceivable by, anyone.
Google and Meta also came under fire.
Front and center at Trump’s 2025 inauguration were the same CEOs—Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg—who once claimed to be big supporters of the Paris Agreement. They’re backing an administration that’s gutting environmental rules and funneling billions of dollars to fossil fuels, while billions of people sweat through record heat. As inequality mounts and once-in-a-century natural disasters now occur every year, Big Tech stays quiet—choosing profits over principles and access over accountability.
The group additionally protested the growing energy cost of AI services.
Big Tech’s AI binge is one of the planet’s fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have shot up more than 50% since 2019, fueled by energy-hungry AI data centers.
XR is calling on people to “boycott tech companies that enable authoritarianism and expand fossil fuel use.”
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Photos: Extinction Rebellion NYC
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