- Several Supercharger stalls were set ablaze near Boston, continuing a pattern of recent attacks on Tesla property that appear related to CEO Elon Musk's politics.
Tesla has long been the calling card of Elon Musk and the cornerstone of his wealth. Its elegant cars are a tangible everyday reminder of what he can accomplish in a way that launching 35-story tall rockets from the southernmost tip of Texas could never match.
Now, however, his vehicles, charging stations and showrooms risk turning into targets to be burned down by those who want to strike out at the world’s richest and most influential entrepreneur.
On Tuesday, police found seven Superchargers apparently torched by arsonists in a town outside of Boston. Littleton Fire Department chief Steele McCurdy said residents had no cause for alarm, however, since the danger was likely limited to Tesla property.
“We do believe that this is isolated in terms of the risk within our community to these particular chargers,” he told local television.
It follows news this week at a showroom near the French city of Toulouse, where a dozen vehicles worth more than half a million dollars were set ablaze.
Only days earlier police in Colorado arrested an individual identifying as trans for vandalizing Tesla property. Musk is a vocal opponent of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery following his own experience with his estranged trans daughter, often saying the “woke mind virus killed my son”.
While this theatrical form of crime captures headlines, Tesla community members have been flagging everyday acts of vandalism for weeks, including their cars getting keyed or finding Supercharger stalls where the cabling has been severed.
The controversy has led to a fierce debate among investors over whether to press Tesla’s typically passive board of directors to try to rein in their CEO's political activity lest it damage the brand, or whether this is just further evidence of the media amplifying bad news in an effort to hurt Musk.
Tesla, whose shares are now worth little more than half their December peak, did not respond to a Fortune request for comment.
Earlier examples
This spate of attacks isn’t the first time such vandalism has targeted Tesla. Last year a group of anti-capitalism extremists in eastern Germany successfully destroyed a substation feeding its Model Y factory in Grünheide with power.
But the frequency of attacks has ramped up following Musk’s flirtation with nationalist ideology that advocates for ethnically homogenous societies so Western culture isn’t “diluted” by outside cultural influences. He's backed a number of European far-right parties particularly concerned about the threat from Islamist-motivated terror attacks, like those recently occurring in German cities like Aschaffenburg and Munich.
“We don’t want to be everything the same everywhere, where it’s just one big sort of soup,” Musk told the German far right AfD party at a rally in January. “We want to have something where you go to different countries and you experience a different culture and its unique and special.”
Musk posed this argument days after eliciting controversy over a stiff, right-armed gesture made at President Trump's inauguration that prompted comparisons with the Nazi “Sieg Heil” salute.
Musk doesn’t seem perturbed by the controversy. When asked by Joe Rogan this week what it felt like to be called a Nazi, Musk repeated a joke that recently landed him in hot water with the Jewish advocacy group Anti-Defamation League.
“People will Goebbels anything down,” he said, before laughing about how he was now being extra careful how he points at things with his right arm in order not to be seen as if he was making another salute.
