People at Tesla are working incredibly hard, they just had a FTE mass layoff and are relying heavily on 'associates'.
This reminds me of the darker days at Zappos with their holocracy business model and all powerful vanity CEO. It's not hard to imagine the disgruntled moving fast and breaking things in frustration
There's no evidence that the guy was paid to sabotage Tesla by any competitor or anything other than a purely personal grudge. That an upset worker intentionally sabotages a production line isn't the extraordinary claim; that your competition is paying some workers to sabotage your production lines is.