Insurance isn’t a magic money machine that erases costs; insurance isn’t free money. This is the logic that results in thieves driving small mom and pop shops out of business. Someone will hold up a gas station thinking, “well, insurance will pay for it.” But every time a business makes a claim, their insurance premiums go up. And just like car insurance, if you make too many claims, eventually you’ll be dropped from coverage, or your premiums will become completely unaffordable. You simply become too great a risk for insurance to cover.

Honestly, torching a Tesla dealership is likely the quickest way to get it shut down. If you just let the cars sit there, they’ll keep cutting the asking price until they sell. Teslas might be unfashionable, but plenty of people living paycheck-to-paycheck will ignore the bad optics if it means they get a hell of a deal on a new car.

But if a dealership is burned to the ground? The dealer was probably already resenting being in the business before the arson attack. Most of these guys became Tesla dealers back when Elon had a very different reputation. But now they can’t just walk away; they have contracts, leases to pay, a franchise agreement, and a pile of inventory that won’t sell. Hell, they probably have once or twice contemplated burning the whole place down themselves just to get the insurance money. And now they have the perfect opportunity to walk away, without having to commit felony insurance fraud. Some random do-gooder just came by and did the criming for them. Sure, they could rebuild, but why? They have an insurance check for millions of dollars. They could spend that rebuilding, getting new inventory etc. But why? Why go to all that trouble, just to end up back selling cars people revile?

I think most people in that situation, unless they were already die-hard MAGA types, would simply chose to take the win and walk away. Maybe they stay in the car business and open up a franchise with some other automaker. Maybe they get out of car sales all together. But there’s little reason to stick with Tesla.

That’s the real value of arson right now. There are tons of Tesla dealers who would honestly probably welcome an arson attack against their dealership, as long as no one was in the building at the time. They could never say so publicly, but honestly, an arson against a Tesla dealership might be the best thing that ever happened to many of the dealership owners.