Man Allegedly Vandalizes 13 Teslas, Gets Busted by His Bag of Takeout

Max Sebastian Solomon apparently hated Elon Musk enough to make 13 Tesla owners pay for it.

Irvine police arrested Solomon, 25, on Tuesday after two nights of vandalism at parking garages near Michelson Drive and Carlson Avenue. He was booked into the Orange County Jail on suspicion of felony vandalism.

The first incident happened around 10:30 PM on July 17. Surveillance video showed a man shaking a spray-paint can, pulling his shirt over his mouth and painting “Nazi” across a Tesla. Four vehicles were damaged that night. Less than a week later, police said nine more Teslas were hit in another garage at the same plaza.

Irvine police spokesman Kyle Oldoerp did not offer a complicated explanation for the alleged targeting:

“My understanding is, he just does not like Tesla,” Oldoerp said. “So, he has personal beliefs or feelings towards that company and took that aggression out by committing this vandalism.”

The 13 owners were strangers to Solomon; people whose only offense was buying the wrong car and parking in the wrong garage.

One owner could not drive his Tesla for several days because he was trying to find someone who could remove the paint. A professional eventually cleaned the car for free after hearing what had happened.

The same owner initially thought the message might have been directed at him:

"My first thought was like hey is this directed at me personally? But quickly became apparent that that wasn't the case so I mean that's good, but terrible that so many people were impacted."

That is the voice of someone who did nothing wrong and had to spend days tracking down a detailer willing to fix it.

Solomon’s apparent message required every Tesla owner in the garage to serve as a stand-in for Musk. Victims described themselves as being “caught in the crossfire” of a larger political grievance.

Tesla owners and employees have been taking the hit for anti-Musk rage for more than a year. Dealerships have been smashed, charging stations torched, and private cars keyed or defaced, all by people treating the company's logo as a stand-in for Musk's politics. The pattern accelerated after Musk took a prominent role in the Trump administration, and it has not let up. What unites the incidents is who actually absorbs the damage: not Musk, not Tesla's executives, but ordinary people who bought a car and now find themselves drafted into someone else's culture war.

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The man responsible wasn't hard to find once investigators got a lead. Solomon was identified because of an earlier encounter in which a man allegedly spat on a Tesla stopped at an intersection. An officer remembered the restaurant takeout bag he was carrying and traced the order to a name. Solomon was arrested at his apartment across the street from one of the parking garages.

Solomon is presumed innocent. For now, he faces a felony vandalism charge over an alleged anti-Tesla campaign that damaged 13 private cars. Musk never had to clean a drop of paint off any of them.

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