A Florida man was arrested this week after allegedly planning to commit a "mass casualty event" at Tesla headquarters in Texas during a Cybertruck promotion attended by Elon Musk, prosecutors said.
Paul Ryan Overeem, a 28-year-old Orlando resident, was booked on suspicion of making a terrorist threat, a third-degree felony, according to a Travis County arrest warrant.
Overeem wrote under the name "ufotnoitalumis" in an Instragram chat and made a series of threats on Nov. 9, targeting Tesla's Cybertruck promotional event in Austin on Thursday, authorities said.
The event was attended by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, though he was not named as a specific target in the arrest warrant.
The threats included: "But yeah so at teh (sic) Tesla event I'm planning to attach (sic) so up to you guys to stop me," "I plan on killing people at that even (sic) ok (sic) November 30th and I would like you do something about it so I don't have to" and "I wanna die."
The suspect also appeared to object to technology in modern life.
“I wanna die. My thoughts haven’t been free for over a year. All the electronics around me,” he wrote, according to the arrest warrant.
Those statements amounted to a Overeem's potential to "carry out his threats of a mass casualty event," according to Travis County Sheriff's Detective Jennifer Boland.
A sheriff's spokesperson on Friday declined to reveal if the suspect had any weapons when he was arrested.
Instagram gave authorities the phone number attached to user "ufotnoitalumis" and it traced back to Overeem, whose Chevy Tahoe truck was then spotted in Austin, according to the affidavit.
He was booked into custody on Wednesday and held in lieu of $300,000 bail, jail records showed.
Overeem does not have any known ties to the Austin area, officials said, and it wasn't immediately clear if he had hired or been assigned an attorney by Friday morning.
