Earlier this week in Maryland, graffiti was found at a Tesla dealership a day after a protest that read “No Musk” with a sign that resembles a swastika. Police in Massachusetts said on Tuesday that seven Tesla charging stations were intentionally set on fire, and the incident is being investigated as suspicious. On Thursday, law enforcement in Portland said that at least seven shots were fired at a Tesla dealership, damaging three cars and shattering windows, according to the CBS affiliate KOIN.
Also on Thursday, a man in Boston was arrested for reportedly placing stickers of Musk on several Teslas, calling the move “free speech” in a video. (His pre-trial hearing for Randall is scheduled for May.)
Musk replied to the video on X, his social media site, writing, “Damaging the property of others, aka vandalism, is not free speech!”
The Tesla CEO has also posted other times about the protests this week on X, saying that he is investigating groups he claims are behind the demonstrations and asking his followers for any intel they may have.
“An investigation has found 5 ActBlue-funded groups responsible for Tesla “protests”: Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project and Democratic Socialists of America,” Musk posted on Saturday. “ActBlue funders include George Soros, Reid Hoffman, Herbert Sandler, Patricia Bauman, and Leah Hunt-Hendrix.”
As Forbes reported, “there is no other evidence” besides Musk’s investigation “linking Soros or Hoffman to the Tesla protests” and “ActBlue does not fund groups, but instead is a platform through which donors can give money to campaigns or organizations.”
In a statement from White House spokesperson Harrison Fields last week, he said that these “Protests will not deter President Trump and Elon Musk from delivering on the promise to establish DOGE and make our federal government more efficient and more accountable to the hardworking American taxpayers across the country.”
Since Trump has been in office, Musk, his boss, and others at the Department of Government Efficiency have, in part, laid off scores of federal workers across the country and threatened to fire more government workers if they didn’t respond to emails justifying their jobs.
