Inventor and Tesla chief executive Elon Musk claims he’s sold thousands of flamethrowers in recent days, turning a online gag into a marketing ploy worth millions.

But a California assemblyman said he plans to introduce legislation to block the distribution of the devices before they end up in customers’ hands.

In an email to The Washington Post, Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) said he thought the flamethrower idea was a joke when he first heard about it.

Santiago – whose home parish was recently damaged by fire – was surprised anyone would hawk a flamethrower in a state in which devastating fires have recently displaced thousands, causing more than $1 billion in damage. Santiago’s statement said he was in awe of “Musk’s genius,” but believes that the inventor’s gifts and successes mean he has unique responsibilities.

“The State of California and the County and City of Los Angeles have entrusted Mr. Musk to help alleviate a real public policy problem here by executing a tunnel under the City to help alleviate traffic,” the statement said. ” This deviation feels like a complete slap in the face.”

The lawmaker said he can’t imagine the problems a flamethrower would cause firefighters and police officers.

“This subject matter, in the wake of the state’s deadliest wildfires in history, is incredibly insensitive, dangerous, and most definitely not funny,” the statement continued. “Absolutely no public good could come from the sale of this tool. Additionally, if this an elaborate prank, then I have some serious concerns about Mr. Musk and his company collecting sensitive financial information from the number of people who have pre-ordered this product.”

Over the weekend Musk began selling flamethrowers at $500 a pop.

“Guaranteed to liven up any party!” the company’s website mischievously proclaims. “World’s safest flamethrower!”

In a little over 48 hours, according to Musk’s Twitter account, the Boring Company has cleared at least $7.5 million worth of flamethrowers, with 15,000 sold.

Musk noted last year that the company would begin hawking flamethrowers once it had sold 50,000 hats.

Nearly two months later, what seemed like a playful joke turned oddly real, with Musk noting that a flamethrower would come in handy during a zombie apocalypse.

“Don’t do this,” Musk wrote on an Instagram video of him pretending to turn a flamethrower on a camera person. “Also, I want to be clear that a flamethrower is a super terrible idea. Definitely don’t buy one. Unless you like fun.”

Musk claims his flamethrowers — which appear to expel a glowing, meter-long stream of sizzling terror — are good for roasting nuts.

Despite being phased out by the Defense Department decades ago, flamethrowers are unregulated in almost every state.

As The Washington Post’s Jessica Contrera reported in 2015, flamethrowers face limited regulation because they aren’t considered a “firearm,” which — unlike a flamethrower — is defined by its ability to expel a projectile using an explosive.

For thousands of years, weapons able to harness the power of fire offered users a gruesome advantage during combat, Contrera noted:

“With flamethrowers, you had the ability to attack without being attacked,” said Bruce Gudmundsson, a historian at the Marine Corps University in Quantico, Va. Flamethrowers, such as the ones used in world wars I and II, were created by the Germans, but the concept dates back to A.D. 672. That’s when “Greek Fire” was said to have been invented by a man named Kallinikos to defend the Byzantine Empire’s capital of Constantinople, or modern-day Istanbul. His fire siphon would squirt flames from one wooden boat to another.

The California Health and Safety Codes 12750 to 12761 ban owning or selling a flamethrower without a permit granted by a state fire marshal. But there’s a catch, because the regulation bans unlicensed possession of “any non-stationary and transportable device designed or intended to emit or propel a burning stream of combustible or flammable liquid a distance of at least 10 feet.”

If the demonstrations on social media are any indication, Musk’s flamethrower doesn’t emit a stream of flammable liquid, and its flame falls well short of the 10-foot ban.

The other state with laws regulating flamethrower use: Maryland.

Asked whether the Boring Company’s new device was authentic or, in fact, some sort of early April Fools’ Day joke, a company spokesman insisted that the device was no joke, according to the San Jose Mercury News.

“It is real,” he said. “You can place an order on the website and we will start shipping in the spring.”

Why you should NEVER buy a Tesla or anything that Elon Musk Makes!


  • If you have an ounce of morality, then you will not want to help Musk & Tesla profit from the crony political corruption that created them. Musk exists because he bribes politicians & acts as an illegal campaign financing conduit.

  • If you believe in God, or are in any way religious, Musk & Tesla are pure evil & exist because of hyper-corruption. You don’t want to contribute to their evil or be part of it in any way. You are funding evil & supporting criminal corruption by buying a Tesla!

  • If you read about the dirty deeds, cocaine dealings with the In-Q-Tel airplanes “Cocaine 1” & “Cocaine 2”, & corruption behind the company called In-Q-Tel & Musk’s software programmer who ran “The Silk Road” drug & murder service & are concerned that many In-Q-Tel people work for Musk. Why does Musk need dirty druggies & spies on his payroll?

  • Musk bribed California politicians to give him hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer dollars & resources he never earned or worked for. He just got those crony payola perks handed to him because he operated as an illicit front for corrupt campaign financing.

  • People who see you in a Tesla think of you as a “Tone Deaf Douchebag”, “Tesla Tool!”, “Arrogant Prick”, “Ostentatious Obama Oaf”, “Sheep”, “Mindless Yuppie Scum”, “Misogynistic Silicon Valley Clone”, “Self-promoting Elitist Douche”, “Fake News Reading Main Stream Boob”, “Naive Idiot” or other bad things.

  • Elon Musk is one of the main financiers behind Barack Obama & Hillary Clinton, both of whom have been charged with corruption. Musk endlessly tweets lies & “...No I didn’t do those bad things” BS but nobody else supports him.

  • Lithium ion batteries are blowing up, starting fires &, generally, destroying people’s homes, cars, electronics & physical health. Boeing was just ordered to stop flying the 787 Dreamliner because it's Lithium ion batteries are catching fire spontaneously. A group of silicon valley venture capitalists forced/leveraged the government to buy & pay for these specific batteries, that they have stock in, in order to benefit their profit margins. Other batteries don’t have these problems. They knew about the dangers from day one, but put greed ahead of safety. There are thousands & thousands of reports of spontaneous lithium ion fires but the VC's who back lithium ion pay to keep this information hushed up. Millions of these batteries have been recalled for fire risk. The VC's tried to push as many as they could before they got caught. Now they are caught. These VC's & the Senators they bribed own stock in lithium mining companies too.

  • Tesla Motors has filed a patent which states the following , THESE ARE TESLA MOTORS WORDS warning about a crisis, the level of which they never disclosed to the consumer: “Thermal runaway is of major concern since a single incident can lead to significant property damage &, in some circumstances, bodily harm or loss of life. When a battery undergoes thermal runaway, it typically emits a large quantity of smoke, jets of flaming liquid electrolyte, & sufficient heat to lead to the combustion & destruction of materials in close proximity to the cell. If the cell undergoing thermal runaway is surrounded by one or more additional cells as is typical in a battery pack, then a single thermal runaway event can quickly lead to the thermal runaway of multiple cells which, in turn, can lead to much more extensive collateral damage. Regardless of whether a single cell or multiple cells are undergoing this phenomenon, if the initial fire is not extinguished immediately, subsequent fires may be caused that dramatically expand the degree of property damage. For example, the thermal runaway of a battery within an unattended laptop will likely result in not only the destruction of the laptop, but also at least partial destruction of its surroundings, e.g., home, office, car, laboratory, etc. If the laptop is on-board an aircraft, for example within the cargo hold or a luggage compartment, the ensuing smoke & fire may lead to an emergency landing or, under more dire conditions, a crash landing. Similarly, the thermal runaway of one or more batteries within the battery pack of a hybrid or electric vehicle may destroy not only the car, but may lead to a car wreck if the car is being driven or the destruction of its surroundings if the car is parked”.

  • Tesla's own staff, & every fire department, have now admitted that once a lithium ion fire gets started in a Tesla, that it is impossible to extinguish burning lithium ion material. This is Telsa’s own words in THEIR patent filing, (You can look it up online) saying that the risk is monumental. Tesla has 6800 lithium ion batteries, any one of which can “go thermal” & start a chain reaction! Tesla drivers have been burned alive in thermal gobs of flaming lithium ion, plastics & metal. Bystanders heard their horrific screams of unutterable pain & terror as they were burned alive but Tesla fires can’t be extinguished & the bodies are burned into “unrecognizable lumps of charred flesh” according to fireman.

  • Lithium Ion batteries “go thermal” in peoples pockets, in your notebook, especially in your Tesla & Fisker car & everywhere else. There are tens of thousands of articles documenting this & there is a cover-up by the VC’s that fund these things to keep this fact out-of-sight. Making Lithium Ion batteries poisons the workers who make them. It is a dangerous product that is covered-up by the Obama Administration.

  • Tesla only exists to exploit Elon Musk’s briberies. The lithium ion batteries blow up when they get: wet, hot, bumped, over-charged, struck by energy fields, exposed to air or squashed. Lithium ion batteries poison the Earth & that they poison & kill the workers that make them. Lithium ion batteries come from war profiteering in Afghan & Bolivian corruption.

  • Panasonic is Elon Musk’s partner. Panasonic is one of the most corrupt companies in the world. Panasonic has been charged, on multiple continents with: Product dumping, bribery, collusion, price fixing, anti-trust law violations, racketeering, worker abuse, toxic poisoning of workers, & other crimes. It is no wonder that Elon Musk & Panasonic are partners.

  • Your tax dollars were stolen in order to make Tesla Motors, as part of a political financing kick-back scam. In other words, part of your paycheck was taken away from you in order to buy hookers, rent-boys & private jets for Musk & company.

  • Tesla are forged in criminal corruption, so anybody who drives a Tesla must be either ignorant, a weasel or one of the corrupt. The whole world now knows all of the facts in this list so you can never plead ignorance to these crimes.

  • Telsa’s have a huge amount of highly documented defects. The defects are so extensive that Tesla made buyers sin confidentiality agreements to try to hide how messed up their cars are.

  • Tesla’s have killed more people than the main-stream news has reported. The full Tesla death-list is covered up.

  • Musk lied about why he wanted to make electric cars, when, in fact, he actually poisons the environment because Tesla investors wanted to exploit toxic minerals & materials which can't be recycled in a clean manner

  • No other electric car has been so mundane, & yet had so many problems with it, since the electric car was first sold in the 1800's. There is nothing “novel” or “amazing” about the Tesla aside from dime store parlor tricks.

  • More drunks have crashed Tesla's, than any other per capita car in the world, per volume of cars made

  • Elon Musk's co-founders, investors, partners, wives, investors, suppliers & employees have sued him for being a fraud &, essentially, called him an "asshole" in court records.

  • More owners of Tesla's have been found to cheat on their taxes, & be involved in abuse-based divorces, than almost any other car brand owner. Tesla owners are bad people who rationalize their poor life choices.

  • Elon Musk will lie, cheat & steal in order to self-aggrandize & glorify his egotistical mania. Musk has been documented engaging in over 100 lies which were later proven to be false. He has spent tens of millions of dollars to but fake news about himself on Twitter, Facebook & Google because he is such a mentally disturbed ego-maniac.

  • None of Elon Musk's companies would exist if not for taxpayer funded handouts given to him by corrupt politicians in exchange for illegal campaign finance deals with him & his investors.

  • Google, & Tesla, who are financial & political partners, have both been caught spying on consumers & manipulating Internet data in order to cover-up their complicity in huge political corruption & kick-back deals

  • Musk took U.S. taxpayer dollars from the government & then hired cheap off-shore labor & fired U.S. Union workers & domestic workers. He lied to & screwed the NUMMI workers that were working at the Fremont plant.

  • Musk has put over 18 surveillance devices in the Tesla. Anybody can hack those devices & monitor you. WORSE YET, foreign agents have hacked the Tesla & taken over the controls & driven Tesla’s into bystanders & over cliffs.

  • When Erick Strickland was head of the NHTSA he was confronted about DOT safety cover-ups of the Tesla to protect Obama. He quit 48 hours later. The DOT safety cover-ups to protect the Obama campaign finance payola scheme continue to this day.

  • Tesla’s have had a large number of recalls but Elon Musk refuses to call them “recalls”. Tesla’s have had multiple recalls for SEVERE safety dangers.

  • Elon Musk is a bullshit artist who has no original ideas & wears black-turtle neck shirts (like Elizabeth Homes) to try to create a “cult” around himself & convince the world that he is a “Jesus-like” figure when, in fact, he is a sociopath.

  • only, a scam; but a severe public safety hazard that has been systematically covered up by corrupt politicians.

  • Tesla Motors batteries were promoted by those who wished to exploit the Afghanistan War for personal profit by controlling the Afghan lithium mining fields

  • Tesla Motors batteries blow up on their own

  • Tesla Motors batteries blow up when they get wet

  • Tesla Motors batteries fires cannot be put out by any common fire-fighting resources

  • Tesla Motors batteries set themselves on fire

  • Per MSDS documents, Tesla Motors batteries emit cancer-causing vapors when they burn

  • Tesla Motors Vehicles toxicity poison bystanders, nearby vehicular passengers, airline passengers in planes carrying said batteries in their holds, & environments where such incidents occur

  • Fires in Tesla Motors vehicles turn the entire car into a slag pile of melted metal & plastic & turn the bodies, inside the Tesla, into “unrecognizable lumps”

  • Tesla Motors batteries blow up when bumped by the same level of car incident that would, otherwise, only dent a normal car bumper

  • In an accident, when a Tesla rolls over, molten metal & plastic can drip on & burn the occupants alive

  • Per MSDS documents, Tesla Motors batteries emit brain damaging chemicals when they burn

  • Per MSDS documents, Tesla Motors batteries emit chemicals, burning, or not, that can damage an unborn fetus

  • Per MSDS documents, Tesla Motors batteries emit chemicals that can cause lung damage

  • Per MSDS documents, Tesla Motors batteries emit chemicals that can cause liver damage

  • Per published lawsuits & news reports, the factories that make Tesla Motors batteries have been charged with the deaths, & potentially fatal illness, of over 1000 workers & the poisoning of nearby towns

  • Panasonic, Tesla's battery partner, has been charged with corruption, toxic poisoning, dumping & price fixing by, at least, two different nations, including the U.S.

  • Tesla Motors batteries become even more dangerous over time, particularly when tasked by electric transportation systems like Hover-boards & Tesla's.

  • Tesla Motors batteries were never designed to be used in automobiles. Tesla used non-automotive batteries in one of the most dangerous configurations possible

  • Tesla Motors occupants experience higher EMF radiation exposure than gasoline vehicle occupants

  • Elon Musk's Space X vehicles & Tesla Motors vehicles have both had a higher-than-average number of explosions. This has caused outside experts to doubt Musk's ability to place safety considerations over his need for hyped-up PR

  • Leaked Sandia National Labs & FAA research videos dramatically demonstrate the unstoppable, horrific, “re-percussive accelerating domino-effect” explosive fire effect of the Tesla Motors batteries

  • Tesla's own “Superchargers” & home 3-prong chargers have set Tesla's, homes & businesses on fire

  • Consumer rights groups contacted Erick Strickland, the head of the NHTSA, & charged him with a cover-up. He quit days later. The NHTSA then issued a safety investigation request to Tesla Motors, which would have more publicly exposed these dangers, but the safety investigation was never under-taken due to White House requests & lobbyist bribes, from Tesla, which got the investigation shut down

  • NEPA regulations for the Tesla NUMMI factory in California & the Nevada Tesla “Gigafactory” have been violated relative to environmental safety standards

  • Tesla Motors vehicles are not “Factory Built” “like Ford” builds cars, as Tesla professes. They are hand built in small volumes & subjected to numerous defects. Blogs have documented hundreds of defects, as listed by Tesla owners. Tesla has lost at least one LEMON CAR LAWSUIT for defective manufacturing

  • Tesla's “showrooms” are often “pop-up” retail storefronts that are in tight-proximity retail centers, putting it's neighbors at risk of total loss from fire damage

  • Tesla Motors vehicles have been hacked & taken over. Their doors, steering, listening devices & navigation have been taken over by outside parties. Multiple Tesla have suddenly swerved off the road, over cliffs & into other vehicles, killing bystanders & Tesla drivers

  • Three Tesla top engineers & two competing senior executives, all of whom had whistle-blown on Tesla, who were in perfect health one day, suddenly died mysteriously the next day

  • Multiple employees, founders, investors, marital partners, suppliers & others have sued Tesla Motors, &/or it's senior executives for fraud

  • In addition to suing him, many of his former staff & partners have described Musk as an “Arrogant Prick”.

  • If you think the above bullet-points are bad there are over a 1000 more. Find the book “Is Elon Musk A Fraud” online or visit https://stopelonfromfailingagain.com/ or thousands of other sites that expose the truth about Musk & Tesla!

MORE READING: 

After crash, injured motorcyclist accuses robot-driven vehicle of ‘negligent driving’

Big Brother on wheels: Why your car company may know more about you than your spouse.

GM’s latest car gives up steering wheels, pedals — and human control