Tesla's HR Policies to Protect Itself Are Precisely What Exposed Its Wrongdoings

The Handelsblatt article with Krupski said the battery electric vehicle (BEV) maker selects people who are believers. They do not apply just because of the payment or the stock options: these workers want to be there for Tesla. They often worship Elon Musk. That theoretically ensures that any unionization effort will die quickly and that workers will make an extra effort at their tasks because the "mission" of saving the world from carbon emissions is also theirs. The faith in that goal and its leader would be an insurance against strikes and dissatisfaction. It is often right the opposite.

For a matter of coherence, a company that promises to save the world will also care for its own customers and employees. When the workers that joined it have signs that this is not truly the case, they will first try to fix the issues they find. When that fails, hell will break loose. Those who idealistically join a cause can feel betrayed if they realize the ultimate goal of whatever they are helping does not correspond to reality.

One of the exceptions I found was Cristina Balan. When she joined Tesla in 2010, the company was only known for the Roadster, and it was starting to develop the Model S. The Romanian engineer would be crucial to solving all the challenges the battery pack presented, which is why the team stamped her initials on the first units as a tribute to her work.

The BEV maker wanted the "CAD Fairy" to be part of its team, but she initially refused because she already had a contract with Fisker for the following six months. Tesla eventually convinced her to visit California and know the team and its premises. The hiring process at the company used to take three stages of interviews and around three months. During her visit, Balan suggested a solution to a problem the company was baking its noodles to solve. Tesla tried to hire her on the spot, and she accepted because she liked the team and the Roadster. Bye, Fisker.

Another evidence of Balan's importance for the BEV maker was that it soon started her process to obtain a green card. Tesla would only do the same for other workers after it was confident of what they had to offer. It took Balan only three months to become a permanent resident in the US. Apart from Romanian, she is also Canadian, but Tesla did not want to hire and fire her every six months. It wanted her aid on a permanent basis.

Around two weeks after joining Tesla, the engineer met Elon Musk at the company's cafeteria. She made him laugh when she asked him when he had joined the company. Her colleagues wondered what joke she had told him and informed her that he was the CEO and part of Paypal. Musk had left the payment company for a while, but he was indeed the CEO at the time. She didn't care much. After all, the "Technoking" was never involved with the engineering team and would only show up at Tesla every other Wednesday for years. Eventually, he would sue Martin Eberhard for the right to call himself a Tesla founder, which a settlement ensured. However, the engineer reinforces Musk did not have much to do with her work.

If you are not aware of Balan's story, she joined the battery pack team and designed 12 different versions of the component until she left in January 2013 – a history that deserves to be told separately. Two months later, Tesla tried to hire her again, but she had already committed to work somewhere else for two more months. The engineer eventually got back in July 2013: she joined the interior fittings team. In that department, Balan discovered safety issues with the floor mats and suspected relations with suppliers. Around the same time, Musk emailed all employees, urging them to talk directly to him if they had anything relevant to share about the business. Following the usual hierarchy path would make them "soon find themselves working for another company."

Balan had no illusions about him or Tesla saving the world. On the contrary, the engineer described him as a "difficult personality" and with a "detestable person" synonym that is NSFW. Despite that, she gave him the benefit of the doubt and wrote him an email in April 2014 saying she wanted to tell him all the problems she had found. Some days later, Balan was taken to a room believing she would have a meeting with the CEO. Musk was not there, and she said she was forced to resign.

A while later, Balan filed an arbitration case, which she won in 2017. It awarded her $320,000, and Tesla paid it in full. In the same year, Tesla had the Huffington Post publish a right of reply in one of its articles that accused Balan of embezzlement and kickback. Since then, she has been trying to sue Tesla for defamation in federal courts. As a former employee, she could be forced to take her case into arbitration again, but she wants the discussion to be as public as Tesla's accusations were. The engineer is trying to clear her name while fighting an aggressive breast cancer. Her treatment ends in February, and she asked for a postponement until it is over, but the court said she had to manifest again in January.

Balan was always fascinated with alternative energy applied to cars. Before joining Tesla, she worked with fuel cells in Japan. The engineer also told me she was moved by watching "Who Killed the Electric Car." She wanted to help turn them into reality. This is the sort of idealism that Tesla actively pursues when hiring people – as long as it aligns with a rosy view of the company at all times. The "problem" with idealism is that it deals with principles, not preferences.

Take Krupski's example. He agreed to earn less money than he had been doing just to join Tesla in Norway. After preventing a Model 3 from catching fire and hurting his hands in the process, the whistleblower realized that the company that would make the world better could make the lives of its workers much worse. Tesla used a battery table that could not stand the weight of its lightest component. The risk of one of them collapsing with something above 500 kilograms (1,102 pounds) over it was always high. Workers also removed suspension bolts with grinding discs and no personal protection equipment, among other dangerous practices.

When the whistleblower felt the company was about to fire him, he discovered the worst element of all: how the BEV maker dealt recklessly with the private data of customers and workers alike. That is the origin of the Tesla Files. He's been trying to alert the public about that ever since despite the personal costs that this has already brought him – and may still carry. There are more examples.

Marc Cage is an Afghanistan veteran who worked as a construction project manager for ten years before Tesla managed to hire him. Like Balan, he was doing just fine elsewhere, which suggests he only accepted the BEV maker's offer because he considered that a precious opportunity. When he faced racist episodes Tesla cannot or does not care to avoid at its factories – as several other lawsuits demonstrate – he decided to sue the company for that. Cage was also appalled by the safety violations the company committed and accused the BEV maker of retaliating against a whistleblower.

We do not have Steven Henkes' full background, but he was actually a SolarCity employee before Tesla bought this company. We only know that he used to be a quality manager at Toyota before he decided to join the solar company. Considering how solid Toyota is, it was either due to a better money offer or because Henkes wanted "to change the world." Whatever it was, he is also evidently guided by principles.

Henkes discovered that defective electrical connectors used on SolarCity's panels could cause fires. He urged Tesla to deactivate the defective solar panels and warn safety regulators and customers about the situation, which the company did not do. Henkes then filed a whistleblower complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in 2019. In the same year, Walmart sued Tesla for seven store fires. Although the company denied any defect in its solar systems, it settled with the retail corporation. The SEC answered only in December 2021 to deny Henkes' request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act (FIA). The allegation was that the SEC was investigating Tesla. We have yet to hear about the results of this investigation.

Finally, we have Karl Hansen, another former military. When he retired as a Special Agent assigned to the US Army Criminal Investigation Command, Protective Services Battalion, he kept working for the government as a civilian until Tesla hired him in 2018. He would be part of an internal investigations department and "was tasked to conduct several very high-profile and specific internal investigations pertaining to potentially damaging alleged criminal activity at the Gigafactory." When he presented the results of his investigation and recommended "specific actions that needed to be undertaken to protect the company," he was fired.

Hansen made whistleblower complaints, and he is also suing the BEV maker for wrongful termination. In his words, "Tesla's tactics are legally questionable, consistent, covert, overt, and they employ them decisively and long-term with the specific intent of siphoning the energy, resources, motivation, and desire of victims who attempt to take a stand based on justice and personal integrity." Like Krupski, this whistleblower is facing a difficult time doing what he thinks is right. In August 2022, I wrote that he had created a crowdfunding campaign to pay his legal bills. At the time, he had raised $52,260 of the $125,000 goal. The campaign has so far achieved $62,416.

These guys could have given up long ago. They could have kept quiet and washed their hands after seeing everything that was wrong with the BEV maker. Believing it could be better is frequently what led them to their current struggles. If they worked just to pay their bills for any other company – which probably offers better wages than Tesla – they would have moved along. They could have fought for unionizing if they cared a bit more, but that would be it. It is the loyalty and belief in its "mission" that it demands from the people it hires that gives Tesla at least a few workers who genuinely care. Too bad that the BEV maker doesn't.