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.