The US attorney general announced charges against three people she accused of “violent destruction of Tesla properties”, amid protests and controversy over Tesla owner Elon Musk’s role in slashing US government staffing and budgets under Donald Trump.
In a statement on Thursday, Pam Bondi said: “The days of committing crimes without consequence have ended. Let this be a warning: if you join this wave of domestic terrorism against Tesla properties, the Department of Justice will put you behind bars.”
The unnamed defendants set to face “the full force of the law” are accused of “using Molotov cocktails to set fire to Tesla cars and charging stations”, according to a justice department release.
One was said to have been “armed with a suppressed AR-15 rifle” when arrested “after throwing approximately eight Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership located in Salem, Oregon”.
Another was arrested in Loveland, Colorado, the release said, after “attempting to light Teslas on fire with Molotov cocktails”, and was allegedly found “in possession of materials used to produce additional incendiary weapons”.
A defendant in Charleston, South Carolina, allegedly “wrote profane messages against President Trump around Tesla charging stations before lighting the charging stations on fire with Molotov cocktails”.
The department said each unnamed defendant faced “serious charges carrying a minimum penalty of five years and up to 20 years in prison” – but did not say what those charges were.
Tesla’s share price has taken a battering since Musk took up his role at the head of the so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge, overseeing brutal cuts to the federal workforce and taking over governmental department and agencies, often on questionable legal grounds. Judges have issued orders against many Doge directives.
One prominent Tesla backer, Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush, said this week brand damage caused by Musk’s work for Trump “has spread globally over the last few weeks into what we would characterize as a brand tornado crisis moment”.
Musk claims to have done nothing “harmful”.
“Tesla is a peaceful company, we’ve never done anything harmful, I’ve never done anything harmful, I’ve always done productive things,” he told Fox News. “So there’s some kind of mental illness thing going on because this doesn’t make any sense.”
Musk did acknowledge that he has “upset” people with his work for Doge and unsubstantiated allegations of improper conduct by government workers, though he made another unsubstantiated claim when he said: “It turns out when you take away the money people get fraudulently, they get very upset.
“They basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we are stopping this terrible waste and corruption in the government. I guess they are bad people. Bad people do bad things.”
