A partner at law firm Cooley LLP got an unexpected call late last year from a lawyer for one of the firm’s most famous clients, Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc., TSLA 1.75% with an ultimatum.

The world’s richest man wanted Cooley, which was representing Tesla in numerous lawsuits, to fire one of its attorneys or it would lose the electric-vehicle company’s business, people familiar with the matter said.

The target of Mr. Musk’s ire was a former U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer whom Cooley had hired for its securities litigation and enforcement practice and who had no involvement in the firm’s work for Tesla. At the SEC, the attorney had interviewed Mr. Musk during the agency’s investigation of the Tesla chief executive’s 2018 tweet claiming, wrongly, to have secured funding to potentially take the electric-vehicle maker private.

The probe resulted in a settlement in which Mr. Musk agreed to resign as chairman and pay a $20 million fine. He also agreed to have a Tesla lawyer review in advance tweets about certain topics, including the company’s financial results, sales numbers and proposed business combinations..

Cooley has declined to fire the attorney, who remains an associate at the firm, the people said. Since early December, Tesla has begun taking steps in several cases to replace Cooley or add additional counsel, legal documents show. Mr. Musk’s rocket company Space Exploration Technologies Corp., also known as SpaceX, has stopped using Cooley for regulatory work, according to people familiar with the matter.

Neither Tesla, SpaceX, nor Mr. Musk responded to requests for comment.

The interaction with Cooley points to a bigger pattern for Mr. Musk: Long dismissive of regulators, he has recently aimed his ire at individuals with ties to regulatory agencies with which he has sparred.

Often, he expresses his displeasure on Twitter, where he has roughly 70 million followers. His comments often lead to an online army rallying to his cause.

This past fall, he turned his sights on a longtime critic of Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance technology, Mary “Missy” Cummings, a researcher on how people interact with autonomous systems who was named as an adviser to the top U.S. auto safety regulator.

The agency had just opened an investigation into Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance technology after a series of crashes in which Teslas ran into one or more parked emergency vehicles. Such probes can lead to recalls, and this was shaping up to be one of the agency’s most extensive investigations to date of advanced driver-assistance technology.

Dr. Cummings, a Duke University engineering professor, had been critical of Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance system known as Autopilot. A study published last year that she co-wrote found that the company’s technology, which doesn’t make vehicles autonomous, performed inconsistently.

Tesla has said that driving with Autopilot engaged is safer than doing so without it.

On December 30, the day after Tesla CEO Elon Musk sold off $1 billion worth of his company’s stock, Tesla announced a recall of nearly half a million of its electric vehicles for safety reasons. When asked if this massive recall surprised her, former Tesla employee, automotive engineer, and whistleblower Cristina Balan responded, “There will be many other recalls like this one. Tesla has hidden many safety issues to protect their stock price.”

Balan worked at Tesla from 2010 through 2014. She was well-regarded at the company, and had been so instrumental in the design of the battery pack for Tesla’s early “Model S” sedan that, as a tribute, Tesla management incorporated her initials into the battery pack clamshell she designed.

After her work with the battery pack, Balan was moved to the interiors design team. It was then that Balan began to notice and document things that she thought would compromise the company’s products: contracts being awarded on the basis of personal relationships, safety issues with interior floor mats, and a history of such problems being covered up by managers.

She was frustrated, and seemed to find an outlet when Tesla CEO Elon Musk sent out a company-wide email that would later be hailed in the business press as an example of the “art of masterful communication.” In that email, Musk laid out his vision of what good communication should look like within Tesla. His email included this exhortation:

“Anyone at Tesla can and should email/talk to anyone else according to what they think is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole company. You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me. . . . Moreover, you should consider yourself obligated to do so until the right thing happens.”

Balan took Musk at his word. On April 12, 2014, she sent him an email asking if they could speak directly about the issues that were worrying her.

A few days later, Balan was escorted to a small room at her Tesla workplace in Fremont, California and asked by human resources personnel to resign. Balan agreed, but only because, she claims, they threatened that if she decided to stay on, the company would deport other members of her team. This threat against her team members resonated with Balan, who is from Romania.
Despite resigning, Balan refused to believe that Musk knew what had happened.
Despite resigning, Balan refused to believe that Musk knew what had happened. On April 19, she sent another email directly to Musk, imploring him to notice her forced resignation, writing, “I am afraid to get into details, because I don’t trust who will get this email first! But they [sic] are quite a few people that we would like to talk to you and tell you what they’ve been thru . . . .”

Failing to hear back from Musk, Balan and Tesla entered mediation to resolve various issues related to her prior employment at the company. But when mediation failed, she filed an arbitration claim in April 2015. Because she had signed an arbitration agreement—an agreement in which parties agree to resolve any conflicts by pleading their respective cases before an impartial arbitrator—she was not allowed to file a suit for wrongful termination or discrimination in a regular court, or to take her case before a judge or jury.

Balan’s story was eventually told in a 2017 article in the Huffington Post. After publication, Tesla demanded that the news website publish the company’s 600-word response. In the post, Tesla contended that Balan had chosen to resign, and also that she had worked on personal projects during company time and used company money to travel without permission. (As of 2022, Tesla has never offered any evidence that either of those charges are true.)
Balan, seeing the article as an accusation of embezzlement, filed a defamation suit against Tesla in a federal court in Washington State, where she had lived since 2014. Tesla’s attorneys countered that Balan could not file a defamation suit in federal court because she was still bound to arbitration by her original employment contract.

In June 2019, U.S. Circuit Court judge Marsha J. Pechman ruled that, while some aspects of Balan’s case should remain in arbitration (and, therefore, not in public record), other aspects, including her contention of defamation, could be heard in federal court and made public.

It is not surprising that Balan, through her experience with Tesla, became an advocate against forced arbitration. Now, nearly eight years after leaving the company, Balan is driven to keep fighting. One of the things that bothers her most is Tesla’s—and, in particular, CEO Musk’s—clear intent to crush all critics and to keep information from the public.

Balan tells The Progressive that when the arbitration process first started, she cared less about any monetary amount than about being allowed access to the email she first sent to Musk. “What’s really critical is that after I start the arbitration with them, the main thing I want to know is if he actually received the email,” she says. “It was the only thing that I wanted . . . and they didn’t want to produce it.”

It took more than sixteen months for Balan to be given what she calls the “raw email” that she first sent to Musk. When she finally received it, she was able to see in the email’s metadata that it was opened by Musk, and was forwarded to Tesla’s human resources director seven minutes after it was opened. Upon learning this, Balan asked in her first arbitration for a copy of the email Musk forwarded, including any additional message from him that might be on it.

Balan says she never received that second email, even though the arbitrator ruled in a sua sponte decision that she be allowed to see it. That decision was made by the arbitrator when Balan was not present, and Balan maintains that the attorney she had employed during that arbitration did not relay that decision or the email’s contents to her for ten months.
Balan is not the only whistleblower who has seen how hard it can be to go up against Tesla and Elon Musk.

Steven Henkes, who worked as a field quality manager for SolarCity (a subsidiary that Tesla first acquired in 2016), has been trying since 2019 to inform the public about defects in the company’s solar panels that can cause fires. In a complaint he filed in 2019 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, Henkes urged Tesla management to “shut down the fire-prone solar systems, report to safety regulators, and notify consumers,” as Reuters phrased it.

Later that year, Walmart filed a lawsuit against Tesla that was later dropped, charging that the company’s solar power system led to fires at seven stores. In March 2021, it was revealed that the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission was also proceeding with an investigation of the company’s solar panels and was interviewing Henkes. In a CNBC report, Henkes relayed a message through his attorney: “There continues to be a real threat of fires due to serial defects in the Tesla installations.”

Henkes was fired from Tesla in 2020, and filed his own lawsuit against the company for wrongful termination. In 2021, he filed a Freedom of Information Act request simply to learn the status of his original complaint. In response, the SEC confirmed in a September letter that “the investigation from which you seek records is still active and ongoing.”

Both Balan and Henkes must now continue to wait and pursue their separate cases through the courts. Balan is set to file an appeal of the latest decision in her case. If she wins that, she will win the right to argue her case in open court, where she hopes that her evidence of corporate wrongdoing going back nearly a decade will become a part of the public record. Henkes’s case against Tesla for wrongful termination is still pending.

And the cases just keep coming. In December 2021, six current and former employees at Tesla’s San Francisco Bay Area electric auto factory and a service center in Southern California filed a lawsuit charging that they were sexually harassed at work, and that the company knew about the harassment but failed to take any action to address it. One month earlier, Jessica Barraza, a Tesla employee in Fremont, filed a lawsuit that accused the company of “rampant sexual harassment.”

Amid all this litigation, Musk divested himself of roughly $1 billion worth of company stock on December 29, 2021, the day before the huge Tesla recall was announced. This followed Musk’s stock sale in November of enough shares to net him nearly $5 billion.
Musk urged his horde of Twitter followers to “Blow the whistle on Tesla!,” by buying a sterling silver whistle.
And stock is not all he’s been selling. Last November, Musk urged his horde of Twitter followers to “Blow the whistle on Tesla!,” by buying a sterling silver whistle (in the shape of the as-yet unreleased Tesla Cybertruck) for a mere $50.

The whistles sold out almost immediately.

Whistleblower advocates were not amused. As FBI whistleblower and Whistleblower Network News journalist Jane Turner tweeted, “We may not have sixty-five million followers, but we possess the truth.”

Musk could be forgiven for thinking he has the right to taunt whistleblowers on Twitter. On December 13, he was named as Time magazine’s “Person of the Year.” In bestowing this recognition, the magazine’s writers described Musk as a “clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P.T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie, and Watchmen’s Doctor Manhattan.”

Balan, asked about fighting this battle in the year 2022, says she “never imagined that Musk will ignore [the issue she raised in her email]. You know how many stories, how many whistleblowers, they went to the press, and they went public. I never thought to go public because I didn’t want to hurt Tesla.”

Balan believed in Tesla. The company and Elon Musk—“visionary” though he may be—might have better served their customers by believing her.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that nobody likes being lied to - in fact, it might just be one of the most infuriating sensations. However, the reason you don't hear about more people going up in flames for having been duped is that a lie only becomes one when its recipient realizes it.


We're probably lied to several times every day, and we're more than likely guilty of it as well - both toward other persons and ourselves. Perhaps that's one of the reasons why we've come to accept certain bendings of the truth, so to call them, as part of everyday life and learn to ignore or just go along with them. Is there really Ethiopian single-origin coffee roasted last week in that espresso? Well, if it tastes decent and keeps me from going to sleep at work, do I really care?

The thing is this harmless lie used by the coffee shop in the example above might gain you as a customer to the detriment of the one next door that doesn't falsely advertise, thus giving it an unfair competitive edge. Care to think what will happen next? That's right, the second coffee shop will magically find some Colombian single-origin beans of its own that are even more freshly roasted because if the competitors next door can get away with it, why shouldn't they?

I realize I may have made family-owned coffee shops seem like a very cut-throat business, but the truth is this kind of behavior becomes all the more prevalent the higher the stakes are. And with companies that are worth over one trillion U.S. dollars, the stakes aren't getting higher than that.

The tech market is by far the most profitable one right now, but getting ahead there - or simply staying alive, for that matter - can be a huge challenge not everyone is up to. Truth be told, what Tesla did - going from nothing in 2008, when the first Roadster was delivered (OK, several millions of dollars aren't "nothing," but by comparison to the size of the companies around it at that time, they were) to being the most valuable company at the stock market - is nothing short of miraculous. Or, some might argue, dubious.

In Tesla's defense, it seems like everyone around it is pushing the limits of deceitfulness as hard as they can, so maybe Elon Musk's company has simply done it better. After all, it wasn't Tesla that invented the idea of hiding important details behind a text in "fine print" or an asterisk.

It sure is making good use of all of it, though, and then some. Marques Brownlee, one of the most respected tech reviewers online decided to start his video called "When Tech Companies Lie to Us..." with an analysis of how Elon Musk chose to present some facts and numbers about the (still unreleased) Tesla Roadster, that would put the EV in a much more positive light even though they didn't exactly stick to the industry's canons.

The bit about the vehicle's 10,000 lb-ft of torque (not even going to bother converting it into newton-meter - suffice to say it's an absurd amount), in particular, has become notorious since. Just in case it's news to you, here's the gist of it: Tesla chose to release the wheel torque figure (which goes through some multipliers) instead of the crank value, which is what the rest of the car industry has been doing for about a century.

Naturally, the hoax was uncovered, and Tesla has since included the mention in its description of the vehicle, but getting that impact during the presentation was what mattered the most. The sad part about this whole shenanigan is that it can be used to showcase just how these shady practices come to become the new norm.

After Tesla did it, GM decided to copy it during the GMC Hummer EV presentation by speaking about the electric truck's 11,500 lb-ft of torque. I bet you they wouldn't have done it if a). Tesla hadn't done it before them, and b). the value was below the 10,000 lb-ft of the Tesla Roadster. Just like GM did, we're going to ignore the fact that one is a truck and the other a sports car, even if that's completely stupid.

After dissecting the Tesla case (with a clear focus on the Roadster, presumably because he is entitled to at least a free one based on the company's referral program from a few years ago and is, completely understandable, a bit sour about it), Marques goes on to speak about other examples from the tech industry that involve all sorts of big companies, from Apple to Samsung.

Marques concludes that there is probably a spectrum of lies these companies use and, this being my addition, it's up to us to decide when a line is crossed and what we are going to do about it. The most basic action you can take is to stop purchasing their product, but no matter how righteous you might want to be, there's a catch to it.

For one thing, these companies know you like the stuff they make so you'll find it hard to say "no" without feeling like you'd be settling for second-best. They rely on it. In fact, it's why they go through all this trouble of lying - you may see through some of them, but you won't be able to spot them all.

And then there's the fact that pretty much everyone does it, so you are essentially left with the task of choosing the lesser evil. Well, if you're going to step on your principles, you might as well end up with a good product, so why even look at the second or lower place?

That's a pretty negative note to end on, but it's the truth we all choose to ignore. Besides, the battery of my MacBook is dying, my Tesla finished charging, and I have to pick up a new Samsung phone and the store is closing soon*, so I'm off.

A full-page ad on the Sunday edition of The New York Times is not exactly cheap. In other words, anyone that pays for one of these means business, and that’s what the Dawn Project is targeting with the Tesla FSD (Full Self-Driving) software. It has presented its first campaign called “Don’t Be a Tesla Crash Test Dummy.”
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This campaign is offering $10,000 for anyone who proves there is any other “commercial product from a Fortune 500 company that has a critical malfunction every 8 minutes.” This is what the Dawn Project’s analysis of FSD has revealed. It also demands that FSD is "removed from our roads until it has 1000 times fewer critical malfunctions."

If you have never heard of the Dawn Project, there’s nothing to be ashamed of because the idea has apparently been established recently. The project’s first campaign targets Tesla’s software with a compelling explanation of why.

According to the Dawson Project’s presentation page, its founder is tired of the way software is designed. Dan O’Dowd presents himself as “the world’s leading expert in creating software that never fails and can’t be hacked.” He would have “created the secure operating systems for projects including Boeing’s 787s, Lockheed Martin’s F-35 Fighter Jets, the Boeing B1-B Intercontinental Nuclear Bomber, and NASA’s Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle.”

Exposing what the Dawn Project aims to tackle, the page says that “computers have become a grave threat to humanity since they have been hooked up to the internet together with every safety-critical device.” The point here is not the exchange of information but rather the fact that they can interfere with “systems which people’s lives depend on.”

In that sense, the “move fast and break things” policy would be a massive liability. It could be acceptable when all it implied was losing data as its most severe consequence. When such software is connected to “cars, the power grid, water plants, and chemical factories,” any bug can be potentially catastrophic. This is why the idea is called the “Dawn Project.” Its goal is “to bring Software from the Dark of Night to the Light of Day.”

The project has analyzed “many hours” of YouTube videos and has established that FSD “commits a Critical Driving Error” about every eight minutes. According to the California DMV’s Driving Performance Evaluation, that means that the software makes things like “disobeying traffic signs or signals,” “making contact with an object when it could have been avoided,” “disobeying safety personnel or safety vehicles,” and “making a dangerous maneuver that forces others to take evasive action.”

Tesla fans will criticize the fact that the analysis was performed on YouTube videos instead of with a vehicle. The Dawn Project defends the analysis stating the videos were made by Tesla fans, not by people that do not like the company. Anyway, it may be taking care of this as we write this article to present evidence of its claims. While the project does not do that, the full-page ad on the Sunday edition of The New York Times shows it is not fooling around: it is tired of “move fast and break things,” especially when things may mean human bodies.

Go anywhere in California and you're bound to see a Tesla Model 3 within minutes. The entire lineup is extremely popular in the Golden State. The Freemont factory also served as Tesla's headquarters, but that'll soon change as CEO Elon Musk moves to business-friendly Texas. The Freemont facility will remain up and running but the attention has now focused on the still under construction Austin Gigafactory, home of the Model Y and, eventually, the Cybertruck.

But Tesla's slow-to-grow lineup has been impacted by other new technologies, mainly Full Self-Driving (FSD), a more advanced version of the already controversial Autopilot. The carmaker has managed to keep FSD records, like incidents on public roads, mostly secret even in California, a state known for regulating just about everything. That could soon change, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has informed the carmaker it is reevaluating its FSD program in order to determine whether it falls under the department's autonomous vehicle regulations. It's also reassessing its own autonomous vehicle policies.

"Recent software updates, videos showing dangerous use of that technology, open investigations by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the opinions of other experts in this space," the DMV announced. California state Senator Lena Gonzalez, chair of the Senate's transportation committee, asked the DMV last month for its opinion on Tesla's FSD beta program. Like other politicians, agencies, and safety advocates, Gonzalez is concerned over Tesla's policy of allowing owners to supervise the operation of their FSD-equipped vehicles.

Waymo, Cruise, and other self-driving car companies, in contrast, must report any crashes or system issues to the DMV. They're also using trained test drivers whereas Tesla requests FSD users/test dummies to pay $10,000 for the service (soon to be $12k). If the state's DMV concludes Tesla's FSD is truly an autonomous driving system, the automaker will have to report all crashes, system failures, and boost test-driver requirements.

So why hasn't California requested this information from Tesla before? Because FSD, like Autopilot, is officially classified as a Level 2 driver-assist system. Waymo vehicles, to compare, are at Level 4, meaning they can drive themselves under certain conditions without direct driver supervision. Neither the California DMV nor Tesla have commented on the possible new rules, but we're fairly certain the carmaker is against any changes to the status quo.

DETROIT — California prosecutors have filed two counts of vehicular manslaughter against the driver of a Tesla on Autopilot who ran a red light, slammed into another car and killed two people in 2019.

The defendant appears to be the first person to be charged with a felony in the United States for a fatal crash involving a motorist who was using a partially automated driving system. Los Angeles County prosecutors filed the charges in October, but they came to light only last week.

The driver, Kevin George Aziz Riad, 27, has pleaded not guilty. Riad, a limousine service driver, is free on bail while the case is pending.

The misuse of Autopilot, which can control steering, speed and braking, has occurred on numerous occasions and is the subject of investigations by two federal agencies. The filing of charges in the California crash could serve notice to drivers who use systems like Autopilot that they cannot rely on them to control vehicles.

The criminal charges aren't the first involving an automated driving system, but they are the first to involve a widely used driver technology. Authorities in Arizona filed a charge of negligent homicide in 2020 against a driver Uber had hired to take part in the testing of a fully autonomous vehicle on public roads. The Uber vehicle, an SUV with the human backup driver on board, struck and killed a pedestrian.

By contrast, Autopilot and other driver-assist systems are widely used on roads across the world. An estimated 765,000 Tesla vehicles are equipped with it in the United States alone.

In the Tesla crash, police said a Model S was moving at a high speed when it left a freeway and ran a red light in the Los Angeles suburb of Gardena and struck a Honda Civic at an intersection on Dec. 29, 2019. Two people who were in the Civic, Gilberto Alcazar Lopez and Maria Guadalupe Nieves-Lopez died at the scene. Riad and a woman in the Tesla were hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries.

Criminal charging documents do not mention Autopilot. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sent investigators to the crash, confirmed last week that Autopilot was in use in the Tesla at the time of the crash.

Riad's defense attorney did not respond to requests for comment last week, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office declined to discuss the case. Riad's preliminary hearing is scheduled for Feb. 23.

NHTSA and the National Transportation Safety Board have been reviewing the widespread misuse of Autopilot by drivers, whose overconfidence and inattention have been blamed for multiple crashes, including fatal ones. In one crash report, the NTSB referred to its misuse as “automation complacency.”

The agency said that in a 2018 crash in Culver City, California, in which a Tesla hit a firetruck, the design of the Autopilot system had “permitted the driver to disengage from the driving task.” No one was hurt in that crash.

Last May, a California man was arrested after officers noticed his Tesla moving down a freeway with the man in the back seat and no one behind the steering wheel.

Teslas that have had Autopilot in use also have hit a highway barrier or tractor-trailers that were crossing roads. NHTSA has sent investigation teams to 26 crashes involving Autopilot since 2016, involving at least 11 deaths.

Messages have been left seeking comment from Tesla, which has disbanded its media relations department. Since the Autopilot crashes began, Tesla has updated the software to try to make it harder for drivers to abuse it. It's also tried to improve Autopilot’s ability to detect emergency vehicles.

The company has said that Autopilot and a more sophisticated “Full Self-Driving” system cannot drive themselves and that drivers must pay attention and be ready to react at anytime. “Full Self-Driving" is being tested by hundreds of Tesla owners on public roads in the U.S.

Bryant Walker Smith, a law professor at the University of South Carolina who studies automated vehicles, said this is the first U.S. case to his knowledge in which serious criminal charges were filed in a fatal crash involving a partially automated driver-assist system. Tesla, he said, could be “criminally, civilly or morally culpable” if it is found to have put a dangerous technology on the road.

Donald Slavik, a Colorado lawyer who has served as a consultant in automotive technology lawsuits, including many against Tesla, said he, too, is unaware of any previous felony charges being filed against a U.S. driver who was using partially automated driver technology involved in a fatal crash.

The families of Lopez and Nieves-Lopez have sued Tesla and Riad in separate lawsuits. They have alleged negligence by Riad and have accused Tesla of selling defective vehicles that can accelerate suddenly and that lack an effective automatic emergency braking system. A joint trial is scheduled for mid-2023.

Lopez's family, in court documents, alleges that the car “suddenly and unintentionally accelerated to an excessive, unsafe and uncontrollable speed.” Nieves-Lopez’s family further asserts that Riad was an unsafe driver, with multiple moving infractions on his record, and couldn't handle the high-performance Tesla.

Separately, NHTSA is investigating a dozen crashes in which a Tesla on Autopilot ran into several parked emergency vehicles. In the crashes under investigation, at least 17 people were injured and one person was killed.

Asked about the manslaughter charges against Riad, the agency issued a statement saying there is no vehicle on sale that can drive itself. And whether or not a car is using a partially automated system, the agency said, “every vehicle requires the human driver to be in control at all times."

NHTSA added that all state laws hold human drivers responsible for operation of their vehicles. Though automated systems can help drivers avoid crashes, the agency said, the technology must be used responsibly.

Rafaela Vasquez, the driver in the Uber autonomous test vehicle, was charged in 2020 with negligent homicide after the SUV fatally struck a pedestrian in suburban Phoenix in 2018. Vasquez has pleaded not guilty. Arizona prosecutors declined to file criminal charges against Uber.