As we previously posted, in June 2018 Tesla filed suit against a former employee, Martin Tripp, alleging trade secret misappropriation. Mr. Tripp has now filed an answer to Tesla’s accusations expanding on his whistleblower defense and bringing three intentional tort counterclaims against Tesla. According to his answer, Mr. Tripp was driven to act as whistleblower in response to numerous manufacturing practices at Tesla’s Nevada facility that allegedly posed a risk to both employees and customers. For example, Mr. Tripp alleges that Tesla used a non-validated manufacturing line to produce automotive parts and that his supervisors allowed workers to leave hazardous amounts of scrap metal throughout the manufacturing area. Mr. Tripp alleges that when his supervisors failed to address these concerns, he brought them to Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk directly. But rather than take corrective action, Tesla reassigned Mr. Tripp to Tesla’s battery assembly line. That’s where Mr. Tripp alleges to have learned that a defective manufacturing robot punctured over a thousand batteries and that Tesla knowingly installed hundreds of these defective batteries in Model S vehicles. Mr. Tripp also denies accessing Tesla’s operating system to steal trade secrets—although he admits to using Tesla’s manufacturing software to track which parts were installed in automobiles.
Additionally, Mr. Tripp brings three counterclaims based, in part, on Tesla’s allegations of trade secret misappropriation. For instance, Mr. Tripp claims Elon Musk defamed him in an email to Tesla employees that accused him of “extensive and damaging sabotage” and of “exporting large amounts of highly sensitive Tesla data to unknown third parties.” In addition to defamation, Mr. Tripp asserts invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress claims based on statements made by Elon Musk and a spokesperson for Tesla about his actions as well as a accusations that Mr. Tripp threatened to “shoot . . .up” the Tesla facility.
We’ll keep watching and report how Tesla responds to Mr. Tripp’s counterclaims.