Two people approached a Tesla parked on the Lower East Side of Manhattan one night last month and spray-painted a bright red swastika on it. A few weeks later, another pair walked up to a Tesla parked in Brooklyn and carved a swastika on its door, along with the word “Nazis.”

The Police Department is searching for the vandals, whose actions it is investigating as hate crimes. But who exactly do they purportedly hate?

Many people would find it hard to imagine a more clear-cut example of a hate crime than vandalizing someone else’s property with a swastika, which has for almost a century been a terrifying and widely recognized symbol used to threaten Jews and other minorities.

But given the rash of protests targeting the electric car company that have taken place nationwide, it appears clear that the vandals in New York City were using the swastikas to attack Elon Musk, the Tesla founder and a top adviser to President Trump — not to broadcast their own support of Nazism.

Mr. Musk, who has been widely criticized for making two arm gestures that many saw as Nazi salutes at a Trump rally on Inauguration Day, has said he sees the vandalism, which has occurred in New York and elsewhere, as a definite hate crime.

“Anyone who scrawls a swastika on a Tesla has obviously committed a hate crime,” Mr. Musk wrote on social media this week.