Someone in the company reached out to me and said, oh, you think he doesn't care about all of those

people? He also doesn't care about the environment. And that was Martin Tripp. That's Lynette Lopez,

a senior correspondent at Insider, who you've heard from a few times during this series. In 2018,

she was contacted by a Tesla employee named Martin Tripp, who was concerned about what he was seeing

at Tesla's

gigafactory in Nevada. He tried to bring his concerns to management and even emailed CEO Elon Musk

directly. Quote, I kept bringing this up to management supervisors, anyone who would listen,

he told the Guardian. But nothing was being done. The figures he'd seen showed 40% of raw materials were being scrapped or reworked,

with big scrap piles throughout the disorderly factory.

Wanting something to be done about it, he finally went to Lopez.

Apparently, it was just so sloppily done because Elon always likes to do things fast.

He likes to do things software fast in a manufacturing sense, which is terrifying.

There was just so much waste and so much money being lost and so much just mess and debris around the factory.

Lopez published her story on June 4th, 2018, and nothing much happened.

But Elon Musk was livid and determined to find the source.

It didn't take long for the company to identify Tripp, but instead of firing him and moving on

or actually addressing his concerns, Musk had spiraled into full conspiracy mode and convinced

himself Tripp was collaborating with one of Tesla's so-called enemies, shortsellers, oil companies,

and other automakers. He went scorched earth and personally hired two former Uber investigators

who'd been accused of unethical behavior like secretly recording employees. They interrogated Tripp for six hours before he was fired,

and the security manager of the Gigafactory later filed a whistleblower report,

saying they'd hacked Tripp's phone and had him followed.

...