Tesla whistleblower alleges ‘narcotics trafficking’ and ‘unauthorized wiretapping’ in SEC complaint
What in the fresh hell is going on at Tesla?
About 20 miles due west of Reno sits the monumental Tesla Gigafactory. Construction started on the now almost 5-million-square-foot building in 2014, with the goal of creating, on a massive scale, the batteries needed to power the company's electric cars. But if a newly released summary of a SEC complaint is to be believed, that's not all that's going on inside those walls.
The document, sent to Mashable by the law firm Meissner Associates, contains allegations made by a former Gigafactor employee that run the gauntlet from "unauthorized wiretapping and hacking," to possible "narcotics trafficking," with a little $37 million copper theft thrown in for good measure.
It's pretty wild.
The employee in question is Karl Hansen, whom Meissner Associates is representing and says used to work in Tesla's "internal security department and its investigations division." Hansen reportedly filed a complaint with the SEC about what he allegedly witnessed while working at Tesla, and his law firm was kind enough to sum it up for us.
Here are just a few of the doozies:
[Tesla] failed to disclose thefts of copper and other raw materials from Tesla’s Gigafactory valued at over $37 million dollars which occurred between January and June 2018.
[Tesla] failed to disclose Tesla’s unauthorized wiretapping and hacking of Tesla employee cell phones and computers, including the hacking and wiretapping of its former employee Martin Tripp (also represented by Meissner Associates)
[Tesla] Failed to disclose a recent internal investigation by Tesla into a May 24th 2018 written notification it received from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration/Storey County Sheriff’s Office Task Force (“DEA”) alleging that a Tesla employee may be a participant in a narcotics trafficking ring involving the sale of significant quantities of cocaine and possibly crystal methamphetamine at the Gigafactory on behalf of a Mexican drug cartel from Sonora Mexico.
We reached out to Tesla for comment about these, frankly, buck-wild claims, but received no response as of press time.
If there is any truth to them — something we do not know at this time — then Tesla CEO Elon Musk is going to have a lot more to worry about than just staying off Twitter.
UPDATE: Aug. 16, 2018, 4:31 p.m. PDT: A Tesla spokesperson provided Mashable with the following statement:
Mr. Hansen’s allegations were taken very seriously when he brought them forward. Some of his claims are outright false. Others could not be corroborated, so we suggested additional investigative steps to try and validate the information he had received second-hand from a single anonymous source. Because we wanted to be sure we got this right, we made numerous attempts to engage further with Mr. Hansen to understand more about what he was claiming and the work that he did in reaching his conclusions. He rejected each of those attempts, and to date has refused to speak with the company further. It seems strange that Mr. Hansen would claim that he is concerned about something happening within the company, but then refuse to engage with the company to discuss the information that he believes he has.
