There are new details in
Tesla’s lawsuit accusing a former employee at its Nevada
Gigafactory of stealing trade secrets, hacking its manufacturing operating system and lying to the media about its Model 3 manufacturing practices. The defendant, Martin Tripp, a former process technician,
tells The Washington Post he’s seeking an attorney and whistleblower protection status. Tripp says he leaked information to the media because he was alarmed by what he saw while employed there.
Tesla
filed suit in federal court in Nevada on Wednesday, alleging that Tripp sent sensitive internal data, photos and video to third parties and hacked into its manufacturing operating system because he didn’t receive a promotion. The complaint says Tripp wrote code that was operating on three computer systems of other employees so that data could be exported after he left the company and it would look like those employees were guilty of the hacking. It also says Tripp acknowledged writing the hacking code and sending proprietary data to third parties.
The Guardian on Thursday reported that Elon Musk told it that Tripp “sent me a threatening email” and that “we received a call at the Gigafactory that he was going to come back and shoot people.” Sheriff’s deputies later met Tripp at his hotel room and questioned him.
Tripp, 40, says he didn’t hack into any Tesla computers, saying, “I don’t have the patience for coding,” and he denies being disgruntled over not getting a promotion. He told the
Post that Tesla shipped hundreds of Model 3s equipped with punctured batteries — a claim Tesla denies — and was interrogated at work last week and fired over the phone Tuesday. He also provided the
Post with an email exchange between himself and Elon Musk in which the Tesla founder says, “You’re a horrible human being,” and Tripp responded, in part, by saying, “Putting cars on the road with safety issues is being a horrible human being!”
Tripp says he moved to Nevada to work for Tesla because he was a big fan of the company and believed he could help the company accelerate the transition to sustainable energy. But he grew disillusioned after witnessing what he claims were wasteful practices generating excessive scrap materials and inaccurate claims by Musk about Model 3 production numbers.
Tesla, meanwhile, is asking the court for permission to search Tripp’s computers, emails, online messages and phone calls.
Musk recently told employees Tesla was
slashing 9 percent of its workforce but that the moves wouldn’t affect Model 3 production.
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