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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

I don't get what is "stunning" here? Maybe I am missing some context?

Someone called Tesla to advise that Tripp was heavily armed and coming at the Gigafactory. Tesla called the police, which then looked for Tripp and found the information to be false.

Subsequently, the police tried to identify who placed the initial call, and found that the caller was just "a concerned friend", as they knew Tripp to be unstable and shaken by his firing from Tesla and thus concerned he could do something like that.

Ultimately from the report we don't know who placed the call, either it is indeed from a "concerned friend" and there is nothing interesting happening here.

Or it is from someone from Tesla trying to harass Tripp as a payback for his leaks, as I have seen suggested on twitter, however nothing in the report even alludes to that, so what am I missing?

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This is a reasonable, yet generous reading of the situation. But the situation stinks. Tripp raised what seemed to be sincere concerns, yet was retaliated against by Tesla in an exceedingly heavy-handed manner. Tesla's current claim is that he caused them over 100 million dollars in damage. The trouble in my mind is that Tesla escalated and has continued to escalate an incredibly unpleasant situation involving Tripp. This situation, and others, seem to strongly suggest that company that runs deeply on principles of fear, going so far as to use incredible amounts of energy on going after a low-level engineer with a possibly reasonable complaint.

A more enlightened response from Tesla, in my mind, had the complaints by Tripp been untrue, would have been to have been to quietly dismiss him, address his claims in a press release, and use gentle language to address him, identifying him, sincerely, if possible, as a genuinely useful member of the team with whom Tesla had an irreconcilable disagreement.

Tesla is not taking this route, however. Their handling of the situation suggests that they may have something more serious to hide or, at minimum, that they are not committed to deeper humanistic means of engaging with individuals that challenge them (though Musk must not be exclusively defined by this, is it so surprising given the terrible names he called one of the Thai rescuers?). Tesla has and are continues to attend to Tripp with tremendous force (legal, and perhaps otherwise -- as suggested by this link) as opposed to just moving on and letting things be. They are proactively seeking to proactively discredit and arguably harm Tripp as opposed to contending with his contentions head on.

> Tripp raised what seemed to be genuine concerns

Were they genuine concerns, though? The overall impression from available sources is that he was overreacting to a situation that, while perhaps unusual, was basically par for the course given that Gigafactory itself is a newly-built facility, and one that's still largely under-construction. Why would you expect things to be 100% perfect and with zero unnecessary waste? Screwups happen all the time, most of the time it's totally normal and not a big concern.

Definitely, I agree that they may have been invalid claims and that screwups do happen. What concerns me is that may have been Tripp was truly sincere if not misguided. Tesla's 100 million dollar lawsuit, however, sends a chilling message that if you harm Tesla, they may go after you with incredible force.

Chilling? That’s normal corporate behaviour. It would be more weird if they didn’t react.

What a depressing attitude. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's acceptable.

I didn’t say it was acceptable. It’s also not acceptable for alligators to bite humans, but the appropriate solution isn’t necessarily to kill all the alligators.

Like the biology of a crocodile, this is the natural behaviour of a capitalist corporate entity under current US law. We have this set of incentives for corporations and we’re all surprised when they follow them to the letter.

Nope. It's pointless to sue a private individual for 100 million dollars. Even if those losses were real, there's no way to recoup them from an unemployed engineer. Tesla is going to spend a lot of money on legal fees with no potential upside -- except that they can fuck up Tripp's life.

It's pretty clear that the goal of these lawsuits is not to recoup losses, but instead to silence critics, and to attack someone that alledgedly "betrayed" Tesla.

This is not normal corporate behavior. Normal companies don't try to swat their ex-employees. Normal companies don't start lawsuits on the whim of their CEO.

Normal companies either don't talk at all about employees that make crazy allegations, or they make a press release thanking the whistleblower, stating that they investigated the allegations and determined that there are no problems and everything is fine!

Moreover, even if they were legitimate, was the press a legitimate place to raise them?

Generally, if you want to whistleblow you should blow the whistle to the regulators. Probably the EPA or a similar agency for any supposed environmental concerns, and the DOT, NHTSA, or a similar agency for any safety concerns related to vehicle's battery packs.

You don't get to leak to the press in violation of your NDA just because you disagree with your employer. Maybe it becomes legitimate if you think that the government and your employer are conspiring to keep issues secret, but I don't see any suggestion of that here.

It feels like there's a common thread between whistleblowers working for Elon Musk and retaliation to their personal lives.

https://old.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/c7pmaf/yes_...

Tesla's Head of Investigations told the police they were able to verify that he was armed, but he wasn't armed so looks like someone somewhere is not telling the truth

Tesla claimed that someone called. Has the call been released? To me it looks like one of Musk goons tried to have a whistle blower shot by the police...

These are extremely bold claims. So it would require some solid proof. From the report the police officer did not seem to doubt the existence of the call. Also, for this to be true, at least Musk, the head of security, and the person working at the call center, would have to be ok with participating in a scheme to try to get someone killed. You need some very solid proofs for this to be taken seriously, do you have any? Or at least any tangential circumstantial evidences more than "it looks to me.."?

What I wrote doesn't imply at all that Musk may be on it, or that the person in the call center even exists. What I claim is that with the elements I have, it looks like the head of security maliciously set the cops on the whistle blower.

It would have been easy for Tesla to release a recording of the call, and if it exists the malicious call could be traced.

He could easily have been shot, police being what it is in the US...

> or that the person in the call center even exists

This person does exists, as you can see in the report that he/she was interviewed by a police officer. So this person would need to be on it too...

Was there ever any attempt to trace the obviously malicious call ? Someone ought to do 20 years for that one (https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/man-behind-fatal-swattin...)

You would have to prove intent as is the case in the story above. If the person calling had some legitimate fear of him actually shooting up the place they were justified in making a warning call even if it wasn't based on any solid proof (although the call should have been to the police and not to Tesla).

A company tried to have a whistleblower swatted.

My question was what would lead us to believe (from those reports) that they did try to have him swatted versus someone actually concerned making the call.

So your answer has 0 value.

For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_headquarters_shooting

If Tesla security had credible information that a recently fired employee who has already damaged the company greatly by leaking information to the press, is inclined to shoot up the place, it would be monumental incompetence on their part if they didn't report this to the police.

And it would be monumental incompetence on the part of the police if they didn't investigate it.

BTW: this wasn't swatting. Swatting is making false, anonymous 911 calls about active, armed threat.

It wasn't anonymous and it wasn't false. Tesla security presented the evidence to the police and the police (not the SWAT team) followed up on that. Let's give the police the benefit of the doubt and assume that they found the evidence credible enough to investigate it.

> it wasn't false.

The police reports in the screenshot do not indicate that the police verified these claims. Rather, they suggest that they took the word of the security personnel from Tesla.

It’s perfectly fine for the police to presume that information given is accurate until proven otherwise! However, it was false information. The police confirmed that the suspect wasn’t armed.

The most charitable reading here is just that the Tesla employees were mistaken, but nothing here says that Tesla presented evidence; so it’s not exculpatory.

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