Remember that iconic skit on "I Think You Should Leave" where a hot dog-shaped car crashes into a building, and then as the crowd demands answers, a man in a hot dog outfit — who clearly crashed the car — appears and starts demanding that the driver be identified?
"We're all trying to find the guy who did this," huffs the hot dog man, played by Tim Robinson.
Well, that's pretty much the situation with Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He's spent the last few months rampaging through the federal government, resulting in an enormous amount of chaos and a historic decline in Tesla sales that's currently causing the automaker's stock value to collapse.
In other words, there's clearly a billionaire whose unpopular actions are responsible for Tesla's woes, and it's Musk himself. But the multi-hyphenate businessman, who's never been comfortable looking in the mirror, is instead blaming a shady cabal of Democratic billionaires for his self-inflicted woes.
In a post on the social network he spent $44 billion to purchase, Elon Musk claimed that an "investigation" had found that ActBlue, a fundraising platform used by liberal and progressive campaigns to raise money, is responsible for the increasing number of protests against his electric vehicle company.
According to Musk, the mysterious investigation named five groups — Troublemakers, Disruption Project, Rise & Resist, Indivisible Project, and the Democratic Socialists of America — that were "funded by" ActBlue and were the main drivers behind the spate of Tesla protests roiling the company in recent months.
It doesn't take all that much investigative prowess, however, to find that all of those grassroots organizations have publicly posted information about protests against Musk at Tesla dealerships.
After erroneously claiming that a nonprofit fundraising platform is ponying up the money for nationwide protests, Musk claimed to call out ActBlue's founders. In his rush to place blame on anyone but himself, the South African emerald scion pointed the finger at George Soros, a fellow billionaire who acts as a popular conservative punching bag, and who doesn't have any documented ties to ActBlue.
Along with Soros, Musk also named multiple other ActBlue "funders," including LinkedIn cofounder and PayPal mafia member Reid Hoffman, progressive oil money heiress Leah Hunt-Hendrix, ProPublica financier Herbert Sandler, and Brennan Center patron Patricia Bauman — the latter two of whom, strikingly, are both dead.
Were this level of "investigation" to be presented as-is in an undergraduate journalism class, the student behind it would probably fail. Musk, however, is no J-school pupil, and the final forte of his argument centers around a real-life recent revelation from the New York Times about several senior ActBlue officials resigning from the nonprofit — though he claims, incorrectly, that they did so "this week" when that staff exodus reportedly occurred weeks ago.
It remains unclear which investigation Musk is getting his information from. Both the House Republicans and an outside counsel hired by ActBlue's staff unions are looking into the nonprofit platform's practices, with the former alleging that some of its donations broke campaign finance regulations and the latter presumably looking into whether those employees were subjected to wrongful internal retaliation.
None of that context, of course, matters to the billionaire whose own donations allegedly broke campaign finance law — especially because he's the reason people hate Tesla now.
More on Tesla protests: Arsonists Set Fire to a Dozen Teslas, Charging Stations Amid "Anti-Capitalist Coordination to Target Tesla"
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