[Johnny555]

But a few billion dollars of market cap and a few years of jail time are the price of being found guilty of what Musk is insinuating.

If I stood to lose $100M, I wouldn't do the dirty work myself, I'd hire someone else to do it for whom taking that risk for $100K (or whatever) is worth the risk - that could be several years (tax-free) pay for some people.

I'd use several levels of anonymization or maybe redirection to try to keep my identity hidden (and I doubt I'd be successful, but it takes a certain level of arrogance to hire someone to sabotage a company because you bet against it and might be losing)

[elihu]

I expect that's how most industrial espionage happens; some company employs the services of some third party research firm to investigate a competitor's product and doesn't explicitly ask for anything illegal. Maybe that third party hires other contractors, and so on. The actionable information bubbles up through the chain, and the original company that funded the "research" has no idea where it came from. They might not even have had any intention of causing a crime to be committed, but ignorance is bliss.

It would be a lot harder to plausibly deny paying some third party for explicit sabotage; as far as I know, companies don't normally pay third parties to cause harm to a competitor for legitimate business reasons.