One person has died and seven others were injured when a Tesla Inc. Cybertruck exploded outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas in what may have been a targeted attack.

According to local media reports, the Cybertruck exploded at about 8:40 a.m. this morning in the valet area of the Trump-owned hotel. The Cybertruck had pulled up in front of the hotel when smoke started billowing from the vehicle before it then exploded.

Of the seven people injured, two were taken to hospital for treatment. The as-yet identified driver of the Cybertruck was the sole fatality.

The explosion outside a Trump Hotel may have been more than a coincidence. Authorities are treating the explosion as a possible act of terror, though investigators do not yet know what caused the blast — an issue with the vehicle or something external that caused the blast.

🚨New footage of the Tesla Cybertruck exploding in front of the Trump hotel

It looks like fireworks exploded

This was intentional

Someone was sending a message to Trump & Elon pic.twitter.com/aTpe0oM6jg

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) January 1, 2025

ABC News reports that an official briefed on the probe said that the Tesla Cybertruck had “a load of fireworks-style mortars on board” and that investigators were urgently working to determine a motive and whether the driver intended to set off the explosion.

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk, who is co-lead of the Department of Government Efficiency, took to X, where he first noted that the whole of Tesla’s senior team was investigating the matter and that “we’ve never seen anything like this.”

In a second post onX, Musk said, “We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself” and that “all vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion.”

In a third tweet, he wrote that the explosion “appears likely to be an act of terrorism” and then linked it to an attack in New Orleans.

Appears likely to be an act of terrorism.

Both this Cybertruck and the F-150 suicide bomb in New Orleans were rented from Turo. Perhaps they are linked in some way. https://t.co/MM6ehJO3SG

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 1, 2025

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation is also involved in the investigation. The special agent in charge, Jeremy Schwartz, said at a press conference, “We’ve got a lot of questions,” and “We’re deploying resources. We will continue to do that until we get to the end of this and figure out exactly what happened and why.”

Image: SiliconANGLE/Ideogram