Tesla sues ex-employee for hacking, theft, and leaking to the press (opens in new tab)

That's such a weird email, the first.

Someone conducts sabotage that is "extensive and damaging"... and you, someone who is known for being blunt and direct (questions from shareholders are "boring, yawn", etc.)...

and you're "dismayed"...?

And to put this in perspective, the graph shows a regular cycle of: peak, shutdown to improve the line, higher peak, shutdown to improve the line, etc. And there's a peak timed for the end of every quarter.

Animats always has the most possible negative thing to say about Tesla, and this comment is typical for him.

>Musk says

I often hear how Hackernews is such a bastion of objectivity and critical thinking.

So why does "Elon says..." hold so much sway? We would laugh if it was "Zuckerberg says..."

Elon has "said" many things for many years which have not come to fruition.

This CNBC article:

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/18/elon-musk-email-employee-con...

It states there was a fire and that Musk references possible Sabotage. Then Musk says there is a real saboteur.

> Musk said this person had conducted "quite extensive and damaging sabotage" to the company's operations, including by changing code to an internal product and exporting data to outsiders.

Most people (myself included) assumed the sabotage he hinted at was done by the saboteur they caught who was intentionally trying to slow down Model 3 production to benefit "short sellers and oil and gas companies". Instead, Tripp just offloaded some data from a completely unrelated factory.

It feels like Musk was intentionally trying to conflate the two, since another fire is obviously bad news and making people believe it was the result of sabotage (with a real saboteur already caught) rather than just poorly run operations is in his best interest.

There is no citation. Animats is making things up to satisfy his hatred of Tesla.

The citation was provided...Bloomberg has been estimated Tesla production based on VIN numbers, etc.

It's a rough estimate that isn't really accurate on a daily or weekly scale but tends to be accurate at the monthly level.

At any rate, Tesla is purportedly redirecting finished cars to non-US buyers or is holding back finished cars to avoid triggering the phase-out of EV-related tax rebates once they hit the 200k car milestone.

He must have known it would be leaked instantly.

It really depends on the management style of the CEO. I've worked with CEOs who took great pains to make sure information and orders traveled down the chain of command. I've worked with others who have no problem getting a low-level person to do something.

You would hope that the CEO had a say.

Not apologising for anyone. And I really could be wrong here.

But to me it sounds like these guys are making battery powered cars and the sabetour worked in a battery plant..

Doesn’t that mean that if the battery line was sabotaged then they’d be unable to ship cars that need those batteries?

Or was it alleged that there were direct and tangible sabotages committed against the cars directly?

Edit: did I say something wrong? Forgive my ignorance on the topic and please explain to me why? A pipeline is a pipeline and if a component is missing you can’t call the product finished.

Edit2: By the downvotes and lack of reply I'm going to assume that people don't like that this question is raised. Why?

It's an internal email warning folks to be vigilant, not a press release assigning fault.

Um, you realize that the battery modules for the Model 3 are produced in the Gigafactory. So problems there would definitely impact vehicle production.

Also, time that Elon and other employees spend on this guy take time away from more important things.

I'm wondering what percentage of Tesla fanboys knew what short-selling was before Musk started ranting about it and now are seemingly knowledgeable on the topic.

Tesla is the stock with the highest amount of short interest at the moment.

>What is with the obsession with "shorts"? I've never seen so much over-reaction to short selling in my life.

I have a question for you.

But first there is so much attention lately on Tesla shorters because they bet 10 billion on Tesla stock going down, and instead it went up, and they are about to all get wiped out.

And because inspite of the fact that Tesla is overcoming its production problems, and SpaceX is going great, the media has been flooded with stories lately about how Musk is a fraud, he is losing his mind, and Tesla is about to go bankrupt, and so many people reasonably believe the shorters are trying to save themselves from disaster by attacking Musk.

Now here is the question. Do you believe the Tesla shorters were smart when they made a prediction Tesla stock was going to go down?

Was he blue-collar? The stuff he performed sounds more like white-collar engineer.

> I'm skeptical that some individual blue-collar worker would risk his financial well-being and possibly freedom to make a few thousand dollars from possibly causing financial harm to Tesla

Few thousand? With insider information, you can use the power of leverage to turn a few thousand into millions within seconds.

A leveraged account + options fun and you could go from thousandaire to a millionaire with a few key strokes.

> What is with the obsession with "shorts"? I've never seen so much over-reaction to short selling in my life.

Gambling addicts love the excitement.

You're assuming that his decision was an individual one decided solely for his own reasons, which is not a supportable assumption to make yet.

You're being down-voted but it would be foolish to ignore the possibility you bring up, especially when we consider that Tesla has competitors based in countries where the rule of law is weaker than it is in the US. Certainly if he's going to break the law and exfiltrate data it would be a small hurdle to try to profit on top of that.

Agreed, I was a minor party to a case like this and it took way longer than I expected for the wheels of justice to turn. It made me nervous for the accused just because the process almost seemed designed to let his life destroy itself even more in the months leading up to any charges being filed.

Tesla has no incentive to get law enforcement involved if they believe the crime is "over". Police poking around Tesla's internal computer systems for months and interviewing everyone is going to be terrible for productivity.

And it gives them no gain.

The question was if law enforcement had been contacted, not if criminal charges would be brought by them if they had.

Probably true, but it could well be in the best interest of Musk and Tesla to file publicly now as far as public perception of the business is concerned.

If he genuinely believes what he is saying is true (i.e. potentially dangerous batteries in Model 3's) then I'd say that is absolutely an honest act of whistleblowing.

But that's the rub, does he believe that or not, or was it as Tesla contends a lie to hurt an employer that passed him over for promotion? The court case is definitely one to watch, particularly if he can provide evidence of his claims.

True, it's straightforward, but knowing Musk's penchant for playing the media, it does come off as an attempt to liken this event to the Uber/Waymo affair. Which is not a fitting comparison.

I’m sure their competitors are falling over each other to learn how to fail to build cars.

I think, if I'm following the media reporting correctly, that they're disputing something which he didn't technically say. The BI article says that "In February, a misprogrammed robot that handles battery modules repeatedly punctured through the plastic housing (called a clamshell) and into some battery cells, the employee said, adding that instead of scrapping all the modules, some were fixed with adhesive and put back on the manufacturing line". That is, the modules were fixed and reused rather than being scrapped.

Tesla claims this is a lie because no punctured cells were ever used in vehicles. This would be true even if - as the article claims - modules were punctured, the battery cells were damaged, and those modules were fixed and put into cars rather than being scrapped, just so long as any obviously punctured cells were replaced in the process. The article is rather vague on that crucial detail. In fact, Tesla's claim would be true even if damaged cells were shipping in actual Model 3s and they knew they were, so long as those cells weren't punctured.

I think the legal term is "he is toast" in this instance

Being that this is a civil suit, he has no right to counsel so anything he said can be used against him. Admitting anything was a dumb if he was planning on defending against a lawsuit.

Right. Didn't mean to imply that there weren't other substantial bases, just prefacing the link for the one associated with an article.

Transferred instead of being promoted, to be precise.

Given that the civil suit says that Tripp transferred that information to third parties, yes, this is beginning to sound like a conspiracy. There are 5 elements of a conspiracy.

  1. 2 or more persons
  2. intention
  3. make an agreement
  4. to violate the law
  5. act in furtherance of that agreement

Conspiracy is a crime and so the Feds would be responsible for investigating and then charging that. This is only a civil suit. But yes, it sounds like a conspiracy.

IANALBICLSUAWATNG

He wasn't even there a year. Hired, not promoted, hack system, leak to the press, exfiltrate data (automated and distributed).

Doesn't look like your typical anything to me.

Leaking information about the inefficiency of Tesla's production line could be construed as whistleblowing. Tesla is a public company and shareholders have right to know of issues that can have an impact on the viability of the company.

Inside jobs are pretty hard to defend against