
Tesla Tripp Police Report Released - moomin
https://twitter.com/PlainSite/status/1197592445812232192
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leoh
It's distressing that every time something negative about Tesla comes out,
there is a knee-jerk reaction like "this is merely a ploy to manipulate the
stock or destroy the company." Yes, news agencies are often wrong. And yes,
there are occasionally manipulators. And although Tesla might be doing great
work, it is unquestionable that they may, at times, be causing significant
harm to individuals. To dismiss the potential of Tesla's wrongdoing
immediately and out of hand feels deeply cult-like to me.

~~~
zozbot234
> "this is merely a ploy to manipulate the stock or destroy the company."

Well, the most favorable thing you could say about $TSLA is that Musk _hasn
't_ managed to destroy the company, in spite of his well-known and recurring
antics.

~~~
sjwright
Given that they’re currently producing over 90,000 cars per quarter, and that
their products have consistently been the benchmark EV for eight years, I
think there are plenty of other favourable things you could say about them?

I’m not remotely a fanboy of that company but your comment does seem to be out
of whack with the scale of their success despite gargantuan odds.

~~~
DanCarvajal
Their competition for those years has been companies that only producing
compliance cars for the California market. Are you really the benchmark when
no one else has been trying?

I do think the Model 3 caught everyone's attention though, but I'm deeply
skeptical that Tesla has any significant first mover advantage. Car companies
aren't exactly unique.

~~~
MattRix
You don't think having much more battery production capacity or a massive
network of superchargers is a significant advantage?

~~~
DanCarvajal
You don't think Toyota, Honda, Volkswagen, Hyundai, or GM couldn't do any of
these things too? They're some of the largest industrial manufacturers in the
world.

~~~
sjwright
It'd be nice if they did.

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tomjakubowski
Headline (and the tweet) is inaccurate. Tripp's attorneys posted the police
report in 2018.

[https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/tesla-related-
polic...](https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/tesla-related-police-
reports/)

[https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/wp-
content/uploads/...](https://www.secwhistleblowerattorney.net/wp-
content/uploads/2018/07/Police-Reports-highlighted.pdf)

------
Voloskaya
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?

~~~
leoh
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.

~~~
zozbot234
> 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.

~~~
leoh
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.

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

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

~~~
sjwright
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.

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rdiddly
"Little birds sing?" WTF is that, we're in the Mafia now? I'd call it self-
aggrandizement by (I can't help but imitate the capitalization) GOUTHRO, were
it not for the fact that they are apparently using literal mob-style
intimidation tactics, now to include this SWATting attempt. Filing a false
police report is a crime and so is retaliation against a whistleblower.

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AndrewBissell
Many of these details, along with other extraordinarily shady activities on
the part of Tesla, came out in a longform Bloomberg article earlier this year:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-
elon...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-03-13/when-elon-musk-
tried-to-destroy-tesla-whistleblower-martin-tripp)

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navd
Ehhhh it’s hard to say if there’s really even a story here. Seems like some
sensationalism going on.

