5th Avenue Apple Store spray-painted by climate protesters calling for boycott

7 hours ago 3

5th Avenue Apple Store spray-painted by protesters calling for company to 'dump Trump' | Photos show 'Boycott' on left and cleaning on the right

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 the company 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.

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.”