An Arizona man who pleaded guilty to setting fire to a Cybertruck and damaging the wall of a Tesla dealership has been sentenced to 60 months in prison and 36 months of supervised release, according to a press release from the U.S. Department of Justice. The arson happened in April 2025, when Tesla CEO Elon Musk was in the middle of taking a chainsaw to the federal government with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Ian William Moses, a 35-year-old from Mesa, Arizona, was captured on surveillance cameras in the early morning hours of April 28, 2025 at the Tesla dealership in town. Moses wore a dark hooded sweatshirt and mask where he was seen setting fire starter logs next to the building.
Moses can be seen pouring gasoline on the starter logs and the building, along with three Tesla vehicles, including a Cybertruck. He lit the starter logs, which caused some damage to the building and destroyed the Cybertruck, according to photos released by the DOJ.
Moses left the scene on a bicycle and was arrested just a quarter mile from the scene, less than two hours after the fire was started.
“Arson can never be an acceptable part of American politics. Mr. Moses’ actions endangered the public and first responders and could have easily turned deadly,” U.S. Attorney Timothy Courchaine said in a statement posted online.
“This five-year sentence reflects the gravity of these crimes and makes clear that politically fueled attacks on Arizona’s communities and businesses will be met with full accountability,” Courchaine continued.
Dozens of incidents involving Tesla dealerships, vehicles, and charging stations happened in the spring of 2025, with at least 51 in the U.S. and 17 in other countries, according to a count last year by Fox News, though it should be noted Fox includes “keying and graffiti” in its tally. There are at least five federal lawsuits involving arson at Tesla dealerships, according to Fox.
The vandalism has been, in part, a response to Elon Musk’s embrace of fascist ideology under President Donald Trump and the billionaire oligarch’s Nazi-style salutes during the president’s second inauguration.
The attacks on Tesla dealerships have also been linked to Musk’s vandalism of the U.S. federal government, which saw hundreds of thousands of government workers laid off and the destruction of entire federal agencies. The foreign aid agency USAID was unilaterally destroyed at Musk’s direction—he described it in Feb. 2025 as feeding it through a wood chipper—even though DOGE had no legal authority to dissolve something created by Congress.
The destruction of USAID is expected to kill millions of people in the next decade, with over 700,000 dead already, according to a tracker maintained by researchers at Boston University. Roughly 88 people are dying per hour.
Unlike the arsonist in Arizona, Musk has faced no legal consequences for dismantling the federal government and killing hundreds of thousands of people through his actions. But that’s probably because so many deaths are merely an abstraction. In America’s dysfunctional media landscape, a burning Cybertruck tends to be a much more potent image than a starving child halfway around the world.
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