Introduction
This Insight explores the growing wave of attacks against Tesla across Europe and North America. While some incidents appear linked to Elon Musk’s role in President Donald Trump’s second administration, a deeper current runs beneath the surface. These attacks fall into two broad categories: on one side are stochastic reactions to current political events; on the other, a more ideologically coherent anti-technology campaign rooted in insurrectionary anarchism. For these actors, Tesla is not just a political or corporate target but a powerful emblem of the techno-industrial system they seek to dismantle – an avatar of surveillance, ecological devastation disguised as ‘green’ technology, and elite control.
Tesla Under Siege
Elon Musk has emerged as a central figure in the volatile period leading up to and following Donald Trump’s second inauguration as the 47th President of the United States on 20 January 2025. From his public eccentricities and the Nazi salute controversy, to his role in the Department of Government Efficiency, Musk remains deeply polarising. While he retains a solid loyal following, his critics have grown more active – and confrontational. In particular, protesters have targeted Musk’s flagship company, Tesla.
In many cases, protests have been peaceful. For example, the protest group Tesla Takedown emerged as a grassroots movement dedicated to non-violent demonstrations. It organised protests in at least 253 cities worldwide, most notably during the ‘Global Day of Action’ on 29 March 2025. While tensions flared at some events, particularly where far-right counter-demonstrators appeared, the organisers consistently reaffirmed their commitment to peaceful protest. In response to Trump’s threats to classify violent targeting of Tesla properties as domestic terrorism, the group clarified: ‘We oppose violence and destruction of property.’ Some protests have resulted in minor vandalism, such as graffiti and keying vehicles, but violence was otherwise averted.
Beyond these largely peaceful protests, a more militant ecosystem has driven several incidents involving vandalism of Tesla vehicles, showrooms, and charging stations. This comprises decentralised actors who endorse, or at least tolerate, violence against property. Many such incidents appear to be spontaneous expressions of discontent with the Technoking of Tesla because of his policies and government role. Examples include an arson attack on a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Colorado; an attempted firebombing of a charging station in North Charleston, South Carolina; and a combined arson-and-shooting attack on Tesla vehicles in Las Vegas, among others. Some cases remain under investigation, but the perpetrators do not appear to have clear ties to clandestine networks.
However, some attacks bear a distinct ideological signature. For example, on 24-25 February, an anarchist cell sabotaged two cranes on a building site and the cable shaft of a freight train line in Berlin. This attack targeted Strabag, a company currently involved in the expansion of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Grünheide. In Toulouse, France, an anarchist group called IAATA (Anti-Authoritarian Information Toulouse and Surrounding Areas) torched a Tesla dealership using petrol cans, damaging a dozen vehicles on 2 March. When claiming responsibility, IAATA situated the attack within the ‘Welcome Spring, Burn a Tesla’ campaign launched by fellow militants. Then, on 31 March 2025, seventeen cars were set ablaze at a Tesla dealership in Rome, prompting Elon Musk to declare it an act of ‘terrorism.’ A communiqué claiming responsibility for the attack was released by an anarchist cell weeks later, on 25 April (Figure 1).
Figure 1: A portion of the communiqué claiming responsibility for the attack on the Tesla dealership in Rome.
These attacks stand out for their motivations. As the analysis below shows, they are not simply a reaction against Elon Musk, his policies, and his role in the American government – they are a case of anti-technology violence, driven by groups identifying with the insurrectionary anarchist tradition and reflecting longstanding patterns of sabotage that predate Musk’s prominence. This raises a set of questions: Who are the insurrectionary anarchists? What drives their hostility toward technology? And how does Tesla fit into their broader struggle?
Understanding Insurrectionary Anarchism
Insurrectionary anarchism represents an extremist offshoot of the broader anarchist movement, which is often non-violent. This current promotes revolutionary insurrection through illegal and violent forms of direct action – attacks that are intended to be immediate, continuous, and spontaneous. Its supporters typically organise through informal, non-hierarchical networks. Notable examples include Greece’s Conspiracy of Cells of Fire (CCF) and Italy’s Informal Anarchist Federation – International Revolutionary Front (FAI-FRI), the latter having expanded internationally after 2011. Smaller cells often affiliate themselves with these larger networks when claiming responsibility for attacks, though some choose to operate under distinct names or even anonymously.
Insurrectionary anarchists often operate through two primary strategies: a ‘movementist’ approach involving infiltration of public protests to incite more radical actions, and a clandestine approach involving covert, illegal sabotage and attacks. Historically, their actions have focused on issues such as prison abolition, environmental degradation, and the rise of far-right politics. Since the early 2010s, opposition to technological progress has become a growing concern.
As I explain in my new book, Stop the Machines: The Rise of Anti-Technology Extremism, this is not an isolated development. Anti-technology extremism is not exclusive to insurrectionary anarchism but rather spans multiple ideologies – from eco-extremism to eco-fascism. Despite profound differences, these milieus share a common goal: the dismantling of techno-industrial civilisation.
Within insurrectionary anarchism, anti-technology violence intensified in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. The same year saw a parcel bomb attack on Swissnuclear, followed by the 2012 kneecapping of the CEO of Ansaldo Nucleare, an Italian nuclear engineering firm. Tesla has also been a recurring target. In March 2024, the Volcano Group Shutting Down Tesla (Vulkangruppe Tesla Abschalten) conducted a major arson attack on the Grünheide Gigafactory near Berlin, halting production and causing hundreds of millions of euros in damages. Six months earlier, in September 2023, an anonymous cell torched a dozen Teslas in Frankfurt, Germany. This is only a partial list of examples; given the anonymity many anarchist factions prefer, the true number of such incidents is likely higher.
This broader context makes clear that the current anarchist campaign is not an isolated or spontaneous outburst but part of a longer, evolving anti-technology insurgency. To grasp its logic, we must understand how insurrectionary anarchists conceptualise technology itself.
Technology as a System of Domination
Within insurrectionary anarchism, views on technology reflect a complicated love-hate relationship. Some embrace it, while others express scepticism or even, like Alfredo Cospito, advocate its outright eradication. At the more extreme end, technology is not seen as a neutral tool but as a totalising system – what Lewis Mumford called the ‘mega-machine.’ This system integrates scientific research, military and police methods, bureaucratic control, and the ideology of progress. Influenced by figures like Theodore J. Kaczynski (the Unabomber), anti-tech anarchists distinguish between ‘simple tools’ (which serve as personal extensions and are tolerated) and ‘organisation-dependent technologies’ (which require complex structures and control). The latter are viewed as inherently oppressive and as the backbone of civilisation, and need to be dismantled.
Technology, in this view, is neither neutral nor under human control. It evolves autonomously and shapes society, rather than being shaped by it. It also benefits the ‘techno-elites’ – a coalition of economic, political, and scientific actors – who seek to usher in a dystopian and totalitarian ‘prison-society’ that would emerge in two stages: the first stage involves overt control through surveillance. The second phase – more insidious – sees people internalise norms, aligning willingly with machines and authority.
Against the Mega-Machine
Anti-tech insurrectionary anarchists aim to overthrow the techno-industrial civilisation by accelerating the collapse of the so-called mega-machine. Drawing again from Kaczynski, they reject reformism in favour of identifying and exploiting the system’s ‘weak links.’ This strategy consists of targeting critical infrastructure, such as power grids, telecommunication towers, 5G antennas, and even so-called ‘green’ technologies, as they are essentially seen as repackaged forms of the same extractive and exploitative systems they claim to replace.
Attacks usually involve sabotage and arson, but at times, more severe methods like improvised explosive devices are used. According to the EUROPOL’s 2023 TESAT, ‘the sending of letter and parcel bombs continues to be a recurring left-wing and anarchist modus operandi. For example, in June 2022, the ‘August Masetti’ cell of the FAI-FRI sent a parcel bomb to the CEO of Leonardo, a multinational specialising in aerospace, defence, and security. Yet attacks are generally designed to avoid casualties, as insurrectionary anarchists tend to be low profile, prioritising property damage and destruction over lethal violence. Examples include an Internet sabotage in France in 2022 that affected more than 100,000 individuals and 2,000 companies, and attacks on train infrastructure in several European countries, including one just hours before the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Similar attacks have also occurred outside of Europe in South America and Southeast Asia.
Insurrectionary anarchists also target research institutions and individuals representing technology. The 2012 kneecapping of a nuclear engineering group’s CEO in Italy, notable for its unusual resort to firearms (which was indeed criticised by other anarchists), fits within this broader trajectory. Other cases include attacks on the Italian Institute of Technology in 2018 and an IBM nanotechnology laboratory in Zurich in 2010. These kinds of attacks follow the evergreen anarchist principle of ‘propaganda of the deed’ – that is, the idea that certain direct actions can influence public opinion and inspire people to revolt, triggering a cascade of further attacks.
The Tesla Campaign in Context
The February and March 2025 attacks in Rome, Toulouse, and Berlin, among others, align closely with the anti-tech tradition within insurrectionary anarchism. Their communiqués emphasise themes of surveillance, elitism, ecological collapse, and technological domination. In Rome, the attackers portrayed Musk as the personification of totalitarian, technocratic capitalism – a techno-fascist project that seeks to subjugate human life to a relentless logic of ‘efficiency.’ Describing themselves as the ‘defects’ that Musk’s project seeks to eliminate, the attackers intended to plant a seed of rebellion in a world of algorithms and fibre-optic cables. In Toulouse, responding to the ‘Welcome Spring, Burn a Tesla’ call, militants linked the attack to broader struggles against fascism, patriarchy, colonialism, and ecological destruction. While these two attacks targeted Tesla as a representation of its owner, Elon Musk, the Berlin attack exemplifies the anarchist tendency to attack infrastructures. Targeting the supply chain arteries vital to Tesla’s expansion, the attackers argue, provides a viable approach to stop technology.
Taken together, these three communiqués demonstrate how some of the recent attacks on Tesla are neither isolated nor purely opportunistic but deeply rooted in a decade-long struggle against techno-industrial civilisation. Whether in the streets of Rome, the Spring nights of Toulouse or the rail yards of Berlin, insurrectionary anarchists have consistently married symbolic spectacles with targeted sabotage. Far from being episodic flare-ups, these actions now form a ‘Spring’ offensive: a somewhat coherent, albeit decentralised and informal, campaign against Elon Musk’s Tesla as a flagship of the techno-elites and their project. Put differently, at this juncture, Tesla has become what nuclear technology was in the 2010s: the emblem of a broader system which anarchists seek to dismantle.
Outlook: Low-Intensity, High-Impact Violence
As this Insight highlights, it is crucial to distinguish between scattered acts of anti-Tesla vandalism triggered by recent events and those that form part of a broader, ideologically driven campaign of anti-technology sabotage within insurrectionary anarchism. At the same time, it is equally important not to overestimate or exaggerate the threat. Despite their dramatic nature, the actions discussed here reflect the typically low intensity of insurrectionary anarchist violence. Lethal force is rare, and attacks typically focus on property. However, a more radical anarcho-nihilist fringe is emerging, advocating extreme forms of struggle. This evolution, paired with the rapid convergence of emerging technologies in the impending Fifth Industrial Revolution that promises to reshape society, could lead to an escalation in the insurrectionary anarchist anti-tech campaign.
This evolving landscape underscores the importance of a more nuanced and granular approach to understanding the motives, networks, and ideological underpinnings of the various groups and individuals involved in forms of violence like the anti-Tesla campaign. Such an approach could allow us to appreciate the distinction between opportunistic vandalism and a broader anti-technology campaign, tailoring responses to the distinct motivations and tactics of specific actors. Law enforcement and domestic intelligence agencies across Europe – see, for example, EUROPOL’s TESAT or the yearly reports of Italy’s Department of Information for Security – have been monitoring anti-tech activities for the last few years. Establishing cross-sector intelligence-sharing frameworks to create repositories of attack signatures, modus operandi, communiqués, and associated networks could enhance early detection of similar campaigns.
Mauro Lubrano is a Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at the University of Bath. His research focuses on anti-technology extremism, leaderless resistance, and innovation processes in violent non-state actors.