So I woke up this morning, made coffee, opened Twitter like I do every day I'm apparently unable to break, and there it was: Elon Musk sent an email to the entire Tesla staff last night accusing an employee of sabotage. Not "someone made a mistake" sabotage. Actual, deliberate, "changing code under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive data to unknown third parties" sabotage. CNBC got hold of the thing and published it this morning, and now it's everywhere.
I want to be clear that I don't know if any of this is true. Neither does anyone reading it outside of Fremont, probably. But I've read the email text a few times now and its the tone that gets me more than the accusation. Musk doesn't just say "we found an issue and we're looking into it." He goes into this whole thing about motive — maybe it's a disgruntled employee who wanted a promotion and didn't get it, maybe its short-sellers paying someone off, maybe its a media outlet planting a mole, maybe (and I am not making this up) its oil companies or a rival automaker. He compares it, sort of, to how hard everyone worked to hit Model 3 production numbers, like the sabotage is a personal insult on top of the actual crime.
And look, Tesla has had a genuinely rough few months getting Model 3 out the door. Theres a literal tent in the parking lot at the Fremont plant right now, a big white structure they threw up back in the spring because the existing assembly line couldn't handle a new general assembly stage, and they're building cars in it to try to hit that 5,000-a-week number by the end of this month. I drove past a photo of it on someone's blog a while back and thought it looked more like a county fair than a car factory. So the backdrop here isn't some calm, well-oiled company that suddenly discovered a mole. It's a company running on fumes and overtime trying to prove a very public promise wasn't a lie, and now the CEO is telling four figures worth of employees that one of their own might be working against them.
Heres my actual opinion on this, since I try not to just recap news on here: sending an all-staff email like this is a strange move if you actually think you have a security problem. If I ran a company and genuinely believed someone inside was funneling data to outside parties, the last thing I'd do is tip off the entire workforce, including presumably the person doing it, before I'd locked things down. Unless the point wasn't really about security. Unless the point was to get ahead of a story that was going to leak anyway, frame it as sabotage instead of, say, incompetence or bad morale, and do it in a way that reads sympathetically because hey, everyone's working so hard and someone's stabbing us in the back. I'm not saying thats definitely what happened. I'm saying it's at least as plausible as the sabotage-ring theory, and nobody's brought that up in what I've read so far today.
Small tangent, but it reminded me of a job I had years ago (not naming it, this isn't that kind of post) where a VP sent out a company-wide email after some inventory numbers didn't add up, strongly implying theft, cc'ing literally everyone including the receptionist. Turned out to be a spreadsheet formula error. Nobody ever got an apology email. I think about that more than I probably should whenever a company goes straight to "someone did this to us" as the first public explanation instead of the third or fourth.
Anyway. Nobody's named publicly as of this morning, and I'd bet money that changes within a few weeks given how these things usually go once lawyers get involved. Whether there really was a saboteur, or whether this was mostly a framing exercise dressed up as an urgent internal memo, is going to take a while to sort out, and I doubt we get the full picture from either side. I just find it a genuinely strange artifact of a company under this much pressure that the CEO's first instinct, at whatever hour last night this got typed out, was to write something this long and this personal to the entire staff instead of picking up a phone.