Tesla charging stations were set ablaze near Boston on Monday. Shots were fired at a Tesla dealership in Oregon after midnight on Thursday. Arrests were made at a nonviolent protest at a Tesla dealership in Lower Manhattan on Saturday.
The electric car company Tesla increasingly found itself in police blotters across the country this week, more than seven weeks after President Trump’s second inauguration swept Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, into the administration as a senior adviser to the President.
Musk, 53, is drawing increasing backlash for his sweeping cuts to federal agencies, a result of the newly formed cost-cutting initiative Musk has labelled the department of government efficiency.
During a demonstration on Saturday at a gleaming Tesla showroom in the West Village neighbourhood of Manhattan, protesters joined in chants of "Nobody voted for Elon Musk" and "Oligarchs out, democracy in". One held a sign saying, "Send Musk to Mars Now!!" (Musk also owns SpaceX.)
Several hundred protesters remained there for two hours, organisers said, blocking entrances and shutting down the dealership.
Some protesters entered the building, and six were arrested, said Alice Hu, an organiser. The New York police department said that five people had been issued summonses for disorderly conduct, while one faced a charge of resisting arrest.
The demonstration came at the end of a week in which employees at a Tesla dealership in Tigard, Oregon, near Portland, arrived at work on Thursday and found gunshot damage.
The police said they believed that at least seven shots had been fired, damaging three cars and shattering windows. One bullet went through a wall and into a computer monitor, the police said.
And on Monday, seven Tesla charging stations were intentionally set on fire at a shopping centre outside Boston, the police said. In another Boston suburb, the police arrested a man on Wednesday who had tagged six Tesla vehicles with decals of Musk in a raised-arm pose.
The police in Brookline, Massachusetts, released a video of the man saying that he had the right to deface the cars because it was his “free speech". When Musk saw the video, he responded, "Damaging the property of others, aka vandalism, is not free speech!"
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday about the protest and vandalism.