Since they cannot get to him since he lives in the cocoon that all rich people can put around themselves, they are going after Teslas.
The Las Vegas police department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are investigating a blaze set at Tesla showroom as potential terrorism. The FBI is probing at least three other incidents of Molotov cocktails hurled at Tesla facilities since January, including one in Kansas City, Missouri, that took place on the same night as the alleged arson in Nevada.
In Las Vegas, in the middle of the night on Tuesday, a cluster of Tesla vehicles were set on fire as they sat in a lot at a Tesla collision center, according to the Las Vegas metropolitan police department. Security cameras caught a person dressed in all black tossing what appeared to be Molotov cocktails into the vehicles at approximately 2.45am.
“Upon arrival, officers discovered several vehicles on fire, as well as the word ‘resist’ spraypainted on the front doors of the business,” said Dori Koren, the assistant sheriff with the Las Vegas metropolitan police department, during a press conference on Tuesday. “At least five Tesla vehicles were damaged, to include at least two of which were engulfed in flames.”
Police said the Las Vegas suspect also fired three rounds of ammunition into the Tesla vehicles parked at the collision center. The sheriff said the incident was a “targeted attack” against the Tesla facility and that there was no threat to the general public.
…Along with Nevada, the Guardian has tracked three other incidents at Tesla showrooms involving Molotov cocktails, including in Oregon, Colorado and Missouri, all of which are under FBI investigation. Another incident in South Carolina, where a suspect threw Molotovs at a Tesla charging station, is being investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Musk of course, is shocked, just shocked, that anyone would attack the brand that is synonymous with him, saying “My companies make great products that people love and I’ve never physically hurt anyone. So why the hate and violence against me? Because I am a deadly threat to the woke mind parasite and the humans it controls.”
You flatter yourself. People do not hate you because of your stupid crusade against the ‘woke mind parasite’, an idea that only exists in your fevered imagination. People hate you because you are an arrogant, entitled jerk who seems to enjoy making ordinary people suffer.
Poor, poor, innocent little Elon, just living your life and making stuff and now having people attack your stuff. You seriously think that the fact that you threw tens of thousands of people out of work and disrupted the lives and work of many more with your stupid back-to-the-office and five-bullet-points per week policy did not harm anyone because you did not physically beat them up yourself?
This is typical of the capitalist class. Violence consists of only physical violence because that is not something they need to use themselves and when they do, they can get the police to do it for them. The much greater harm they do to people, their families, and their communities by their actions does not count as violence
Bullies love to whine and play the victim when people fight back against their acts of aggression.
Close, but not quite… Note the juxtaposition between “I’ve never physically hurt anyone” and “the hate and violence against me”. Nobody has physically hurt him either, but an attack on his property counts as violence, even though it’s indirect. (It’s indirect because the cars in question don’t belong to him -- they belong to a limited liability corporation. The only way in which this even counts as an attack on his property is via the share price of the company, which forms a substantial portion of his wealth.)
The real distinction is that violence only counts if it’s directed against people who matter -- i.e. wealthy people.
The fact that he chose to include the qualifier when he said “I’ve never physically hurt anyone” is interesting, I think. Why not just say “I’ve never hurt anyone”? Surely not because he feels compelled to be honest?
The word “physically”, as in “I’ve never physically hurt anyone”, is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting there. It is simply not possible to acquire a billion pounds without hurting someone.
We really need to get away from the idea that only physically attacking a person’s body counts as “hurting them”. Physically touching a person can do less damage, and of a kind that is more easily healed, than a sustained campaign of psychological warfare (which, in extremis, has led people to become their own murder weapons; such murders are usually mis-recorded as suicides). Yet for some reason, we insist collectively to pretend that the most damaging words are less harmful than the gentlest physical touch and a broad gap exists between the two.
I would beg to differ on the “never physically hurt anyone” front. An awful lot of physical suffering arises from capitalist exploitation, including hunger, poverty, industrial accidents, denial of healthcare, stress, precarity and the nervous exhaustion of alienation from the products of one’s labour. Yes it’s systemic, rather than direct, but it’s still physical harm.
Now that Musk and Trump have cancelled USAID, it is estimated that 3 million people will die of hunger due to lack of food, HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, all programs that USAID funded.
As Musk pointed out, Hitler never personally killed anyone either.
At the upper levels of society where Musk lives, people can and do kill millions and tens of millions of people by the decisions they make that are carried out by others.
Yeah, people are very angry and fed up with Elon Musk.
Months ago, I was stopped at a red light.
The car in front of me was a Tesla with a bumper sticker.
“I bought this car before we knew Elon Musk was crazy.”
I’ve seen it on other Teslas since then.
I would never, ever buy anything even remotely associated with Musk. I even canceled my Paypal account.
And when I do see a Tesla car, I always wonder what is wrong with whoever owns it and am glad it isn’t me.
Worldwide, sales of Tesla cars have dropped by a lot.
A lot of people don’t want any of their hard earned money ending up in Elon Musk’s bank accounts.
Business opportunity:
Sell car decals saying “I bought the car BEFORE Elon became a nazi”, to be applied on all sides of each car.
Raven @ 4
Musk said the holocaust was done by public servants… placing park rangers and MDs in the veteran administration in the same category as concentration camp guards. Classy.
…As mentioned above, Muskphobia is now global. It is certainly strong in Europe since he did the thing with AfD in Germany, and said (the arch- reactionary) Nigel Farage was “not up to it”.
In addition to the bumper stickers, I’ve also read about people prying the Tesla badges off their cars, or even replacing them with fake badges of other brands. Just so it’s a little less obvious that their car is a Tesla.
@ ^
Yikes.
Adam Lee @9: Nothing can disguise a ‘cybertruck’ (what an ugly name for an even uglier vehicle).
@6: counterpoint business opportunity: strongly self-adhesive and really difficult to remove swastika decals, with the words “Swasticar -- 0-1939 in 3 seconds” on them. To be applied to any Tesla you may happen to be walking past in a car park. I’d consider buying a few… (Warning, if anyone is considering doing this and doesn’t know this already: in case you didn’t already hate Teslas enough, know that you are potentially under surveillance by every Tesla you walk past. When the driver leaves them unattended in “Sentry Mode”, cameras monitor the area around the vehicle and record activity. Multiple people have been convicted for damaging the cars after footage from their onboard cameras made them identifiable, so if you’re planning on making your own little protest, do bear this in mind.)
Initially that sounds hyperbolic, but consider: what IS terrorism, if not the use of violence against persons OR property in order to effect political change? Because if, at root, your violence isn’t aimed at effecting political change, you’re just a thug. But the people firebombing Tesla are, one might reasonably assume, not just doing it for shits and giggles, but are rather demonstrating their disapproval of the head of the Department of Government Efficiency. So… sounds like terrorism to me. And therefore it should be condemned. Right?
I get the impulse to push back against Musk but some of the reaction feels a bit out of touch. How many people can just decide to sell their car within the next month and get a new one? Not very many.
And while vandalism on a Tesla lot costs Elon something, vandalism elsewhere actually makes him money when people have to buy replacement parts. I don’t think anyone wants that except for him.
That said, vandalism that would have the desired effect is risky. Cars are expensive so the same reasons that keep people from trivially replacing a Tesla would also make it worthwhile to put extra alarms, cameras, and monitoring in place on Tesla lots.
anat @11:
“Nothing can disguise a ‘cybertruck”
Wrong. Park it next to a row of dumpsters. It blends right in.
Though the Cybertruck was released after Elon was already pretty crazy, so they have less of an excuse.
While molesting a few Tesla’s sends the message, we don’t like what Musk & co. is doing, I don’t think it will be a effective form of protest. It allows the administration to use terms like “domestic terrorism,” making it more probable that Putin’s Poltroon will try to use the violence as an excuse to call for Marshall law or some new form of oppression he conceives himself, the political change might be for the worse. The inveterate liar will never relinquish power without a drawn-out fight and I worry we could lose voting as a means to regain that power.
As Musk pointed out, Hitler never personally killed anyone either.
He killed Hitler!
One thing Musk is doing is demonstrating one of the great flaws in libertarianism -- the libertarian or anarcho-capitalist’s view is that they should be able to do anything they want, within the limits of their power and influence. But the situation is untenable if we try to actually build a civilization around that -- there are inevitable conflicts of power and goals. A simple example would be Musk’s apparent interest in taking part in the profits of his companies, but to maximize that profit he has to prevent unionization. And, of course, we can see that simply being high-handed and ordering people about does not make one popular.
@17: what is it about the existence of conflicting goals that makes the situation untenable? As long as one party (i.e. the billionaire(s)) is in power, the existence of people with goals that conflict with theirs (e.g. workers) is pretty irrelevant. The pharoah’s goals conflicted with those of the slaves of the Egyptian civilisation, but that was tenable for at least a couple of thousand years.
And I’d think it obvious that being popular isn’t his goal. “Popularity” is a means to gain power. Once you have power, you don’t need the popularity any more. Trump clearly no longer even bothers pretending that he gives a monkey’s about the hordes of dolts who put him where he is. He’s there now, he doesn’t need them any more, hence DOGE etc.
One of the things that has really given Trump power is, for want of a better term, “Trumpism” — the fanatical popular support for Trump, from all classes of Republicans. This has affected government at all levels — those that oppose Trump lose support from Trumpist voters; those that support Trump get support from Trumpist voters.
But if Trump loses that popularity, voters could conceivably switch sides and vote for congresspersons who oppose Trump, and Trump could, conceivably, be impeached and convicted after the midterms.
Will that happen? I dunno. But Trump being totally indifferent to his base would be one of the least wise things done of his many unwise actions.
” I don’t think it will be a effective form of protest. It allows the administration to use terms like “domestic terrorism,””
They label people who peacefully protest genocide as domestic terrorists. Anything other than kissing their boots risks getting you labelled a terrorist
Monkeys could, conceivably, fly out of my arsehole.
There is a good news story coming out of this, thanks to your friend and mine, capitalism. Car insurance providers are not charities, and they don’t give two shits about environmentalist ideology.
There have already been reports in the press about the many, many inherent problems with battery electric vehicles generally, including but not limited to:
-- much higher prices
-- increased damage to roads due to their considerably greater weight
-- accidents that would be trivial in an ICE car completely writing off an EV because even miniscule damage to the battery renders it irrepairable and too dangerous to be allowed on the road
-- the terrifying consequences of an electrical fault leading to a fire, not just to the vehicle and anyone in it, but to any vehicle or person within about 5m
All these factors and more have already led to EV owners reporting that their insurance premiums have been doubled or tripled or even more. Worse, some insurance companies have simply stopped insuring EVs altogether, even for customers who were merely renewing an existing policy. The market is quietly making sure that EVs do NOT replace petrol or diesel engines until they’re actually fit for purpose, which they’re demonstrably not, yet. Turns out it is useful sometimes.
Now add on to that the additional risks that now seem to be becoming attached to owning a Tesla specifically, and it won’t take much before it becomes impossible to get insurance to drive a Tesla on the road at all. Who’d offer insurance on a vehicle that’s being specifically targetted in this way? You’d be throwing your money away.
If you own a Tesla, or know someone who does, the time to sell is now, while it’s still expensive but possible to insure one, and the second hand value isn’t literally zero, which it will be when the insurance companies start to have to pay out to owners whose EVs have been vandalised like this. Money talks, and if this sort of thing spreads, the insurance companies’ money will be saying “No.”