You are describing entirely legal actions. Sabotage and (this form of) industrial espionage are very much illegal. There's quite a difference there.
> a few $100k is pocket change for these guys
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.
That's not a small leap.
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)
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.
In terms of the actual espionage end of things, it’s covered by EEA 1996 - and the prosecutions there have always gone for the hand, not the head, and the fines have been in the thousands, not millions, of dollars range.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Espionage_Act_of_19...
As for actual jail time, here [1] is a single engineer in California (same jurisdiction as Tesla, presumably) that was sentenced to 15 years. Also, $28 million in fines, which is what he earned for his espionage. Another engineer got 2.5 years for the same incident [2]. And this was the very first instance of people being convicted under the Economic Espionage Act you mentioned. Further reading: [3].
I don't think the facts support your position.
[1] http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-espionage-sentence-dup...
[2] https://www.law360.com/articles/571212/ex-dupont-engineer-ge...
[3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/two-individuals-and-company-f...
Had a friend high up in Bear Stearns tech department, all the way until the end, that had the exact opposite experience of you. His experience evokes an ethos of "get ahead at all costs".
No doubt there are more Billions-esque shady practices out there in the wild than you know.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/04/15/tesla-has...
There's a (mediocre) documentary on Netflix about Bill Ackman's famous Herbalife short. In there they detail the hundreds of $1000 spent just defending his short position through hiring former Herbalife people, funding legal campaigns, funding support groups. If you're short to the tune of a few $100 million - a few $100k is pocket change for these guys.