Can you provide examples of explicit corporate sabotage (e.g. criminally stopping production in a factory) being lightly punished by the SEC?

No, because corporate sabotage is outside of their remit. They would only look at it within the realms of market manipulation and insider trading, for which the punishment is a) usually light and b) usually deflected onto a fall guy.

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...

You started by questioning jail time, then brought in the SEC. Now you're stating the SEC doesn't deal with industrial sabotage and talking about fines, which no one else mentioned.

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...