A former employee who Tesla pegged earlier this week as a saboteur said instead that he is a whistleblower trying to expose “some really scary things” at the innovative car company.
"I don't have the patience for coding," Martin Tripp, 40, told the Washington Post, after Tesla filed suit against him.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk had alerted employees in an email that an insider changed code on internal products and exfiltrated data to outsiders, damaging company operations and possibly causing a fire.
“I was dismayed to learn this weekend about a Tesla employee who had conducted quite extensive and damaging sabotage to our operations,” Musk wrote in an email. “This included making direct code changes to the Tesla Manufacturing Operating System under false usernames and exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.”
Tesla said Tripp, who wasn't initially identified, sabotaged the company because he was passed over for a promotion, something that the former employee denied.
"That's their generic excuse. I could literally care less," the Post cited him as saying.
