Who Trolled Amber? - Horrible human being | Elon's Spies Ep2

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

When Martin Tripp worked at Tesla, he took the advice of his boss Elon Musk - if you discover a problem, tell me about it. But when Martin shares his concerns, his world begins to spiral out of control. You can find out more about Tortoise:Download the Tortoise app - for a listening experience curated by our journalistsSubscribe to Tortoise+ on Apple Podcasts for early access and ad-free contentBecome a member and get access to all of Tortoise's premium audio offerings and moreIf you want to get in touch with us directly about a story, or tell us more about the stories you want to hear about contact [e-mail]: Alexi MostrousProducer: Gary MarshallOriginal Music & Sound design: Tom KinsellaPodcast artwork: Jon Hill Executive producer: Ceri Thomas Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Monopoly Double Play is back in McDonald's, and it's easy to get into the win. First, you peel on pack. This is me winning a universal theme park vacation! Then, again in app. And me, in a new Chevrolet Equinox RS. There are millions of prizes, including a chance to win cash every minute in the app. Cash doesn't make any noise, but it's awesome! Get into the game with Monopoly Double Play at McDonald's.

Wall supplies last one in five chances to win GamePuse prizes at outset, chances to win Double Play prizes based on time of code entry, and draw prizes based on number of entries in each draw. Last time on Elon's Spies. Since we published, another source came forward to say that they had seen a dossier that was pulled together by this private investigator. This is some of my first emails with Elon Musk. Eventually, he sends me this kind of long screed about Bernie Nunsworth Claiming that he was a quote child rapist who had taken a 12 year old bride I find it difficult to talk about because I think it's the most disgusting thing that you can call Anybody really once the private investigator got involved then you know things get pretty shitty.

Morning this is the 21st of August 2024. I'm basically going to read out an email. So the email starts, Dear Martin, first of all, I would like to congratulate you and the team on what they achieved with the rescue. Towards the end of my interview with Vernon Onsworth, he mentioned something that makes my ears prick up. I'd spent a lot of time talking to him about a man called James Howard Higgins, a convicted fraudster who successfully convinced Elon Musk that Vernon had skeletons in his closet. Howard Higgins spent weeks feeding false information back to Musk and his team. I've seen a lot of court documents which lay that relationship bare. But I'd never seen the email that Vernon was now referring to. It wasn't in the court papers and, as far as I'm aware, has never been made public.

Vernon doesn't have it in front of him, this is six years ago we're talking about, and it takes him a couple of days to find. When we get back on the phone he reads it out. I have been asked to make discrete inquiries with people who know Vernon to find out what kind of person he is. The email arrives out of the blue two months after Musk's pedo guy tweet. It's sent to Martin Ellis, someone who helped Fern with the rescue in Thailand. The sender says he works for a company called Orion Investigations. He doesn't

appear to have anything to do with James Howard Higgins. In fact, he says he wants to challenge the content of reports produced on behalf of Musk. If you were willing to speak with me, anything you said would be off the record. And he gives Martin Ellis a big assurance. I am not working on behalf of Elon Musk. We have been appointed by a third party who in turn is working on behalf of Vernon. Vernon knows that this just isn't true. He never commissioned anyone to do this. So the question is, who employed Orion?

Who employed this second investigation firm to try and dig up information on Vernon, a firm which was willing to say that they worked for him when they didn't? I tried to contact Orion about this, but when I got them on the phone, their representatives couldn't say anything on the record. However, I understand that their position is that they never actually knew the identity of their ultimate client. Orion was hired through an intermediary,

another company based in Thailand. To me, the timing of Orion's email, plus the very specific brief that the firm was given, means that the pool of people who could have employed them through that intermediary is very small. And Orion agrees. I understand that the firm now accepts that its ultimate client, the person responsible for paying their bills, wasn't Vernon-Onsworth but was very likely to have been Elon Musk. And if that's true I think it matters because it starts to establish a pattern. Musk now needs to reveal exactly what surveillance he used on me, which firms and what methods.

The pedo guy defamation still hangs over me six years later. When it comes to private investigators, how many times was Musk willing to push the boundaries? Uncovering Orion's involvement in Vernon's case felt like progress, but it was also a bit depressing. It showed how murky the world of private intelligence was, how sometimes even the investigation firms themselves aren't aware of who ultimately is paying them. If Elon Musk could shield his use of private investigators in this way, how was I going to uncover how he used them more broadly? Luckily, someone came along to lift the curtain. From Tortoise Media, this is Elon's Spies.

Episode 2, Horrible Human Being. Can I just get you to sit in this chair? Thank you and you'll be talking to this microphone. I can't give you the real name of the man who came into our studio, but let's call him Max. So how would you like to describe yourself? I'll describe myself as a Tesla whistleblower. And what can you tell me about yourself in a way that kind of preserves your anonymity? I feel like I'm working for the public, for the public interest, and I'm sharing information that could help the public

understand how Tesla's top management operates. Max used to work at Tesla. He had concerns about safety there. When his concerns were ignored, he started to think about other ways to draw attention. You want to stay anonymous in this interview, can you tell me why it's important that we protect your identity? I'm standing up against very dangerous and powerful individuals so it's reasonable to protect my identity. We're only in the studio with Max for around 10 minutes, but even for that short time, the impact on his body language was clear. His hands were pressed against his thighs, he couldn't quite sit still.

But just speaking about it makes me anxious, my hands are like rubbing my hands. Yeah, yeah. It's just what it is. quite sit still. Max says his concerns over safety were ignored at Tesla, so he began leaking documents to journalists. It was a big decision, and one that still weighs heavily on his mind. He says his mental health has suffered after the way he was treated by Tesla, and as it turns out, he's not alone in that. Most of Max's documents are about Tesla's famous autonomous driving technology. It's what lets you take your hands off the wheel and let the car do all the work. Max says the company cut corners when it came to this technology's development.

Tesla strongly denies this, by the way. While this safety data was fascinating, I was interested in something else Max's documents showed. I've just been handed these internal documents that relate to Musk's security operation. I don't know exactly what detail they contain, but they're the first time I think that a journalist has got to look at exactly how Musk runs his surveillance operation. I spent a few days looking through Max's material. Inside were dozens of invoices to Elon Musk from a security firm called Gavin de Becker and Associates.

And I had this vision then that prominent people would have a business manager or an agent or a law firm and they would have this other consulting firm that would advise them on safety and privacy. And that vision at 19 is pretty much what's happened. I've heard of this company before. They've provided security for other big billionaires like Jeff Bezos. From 2014, dozens of Gavin De Becker employees were tasked with protecting Musk. The documents show how they were constantly at Musk's side, protecting him but also picking up his dry cleaning, buying expensive sunglasses for him from Amazon or picking up his tab at hotels and nightclubs

around the world. The invoices were for big money, enough to pay for a security team which operates like a mini-secret service, with operatives drawn from the CIA, the US Marines and the FBI. According to one report, Musk's bodyguards even go to the toilet with him. But Gavin De Becker didn't just provide personal protection to Musk. So I think what these documents show is that Gavin De Becker offered two services to Elon Musk and to Tesla. One is the security side, the guys that stand next to him and protect him, but the other is investigations. If someone is threatening Tesla or Musk, Gavin De Becker will look into it.

I should say here, this isn't unusual. As one of the richest men in the world, Musk faces stalkers and death threats on a regular basis. But Gavin De Becker didn't just investigate potential stalkers on Musk's behalf. The invoices show they prepared reports on competitors and rivals, people like the guy who used to own the tesla.com domain name. He reportedly was visited by a private investigator on three occasions. The documents also contain hints as to how Gavin De Becker investigators gathered information for their boss. So there's one invoice from September 2014 which bills Musk for investigative research and a sting operation in San Francisco. It's unclear what case that related to but a sting

operation is interesting because stings are not necessarily legal practices. It's hard to know what sting operation might refer to here. A sting generally means when an investigator goes undercover, in other words, when he obtains information by deception. But it covers a range of behaviours, from the ordinary to the sinister, and the documents don't contain details about the particular case in which it was used. There's also no evidence that Gavin De Becker acted illegally. When I put all this to Gavin De Becker, they didn't want to comment. I felt like the picture was getting clearer. The Gavin De Becker documents show that Musk has employed investigators for years. That they looked into people who weren't a physical threat to Musk, and how they used

controversial techniques like pretexting – meaning pretending to be someone you're not – and sting operations to get results. What I wanted to know next was how Musk used private investigators when it came to something really important to him – his own companies. My name is Lynette Lopez. I am a journalist and commentator. And for these purposes, I'd say that I spent years investigating Tesla and Elon Musk. That's fantastic. And actually that segues nicely into my second question, which is how long have you been reporting on Elon Musk?

I started looking into Tesla in 2018, about the time that the company ramped up, made this car called the Model 3, right before it moved to China, basically right before Elon Musk kind of really caught his stride as a billionaire mogul. It was post-Iron Man, pre-weird political Elon. Lynette Lopez started paying attention to Musk in the same year as the Vernon Unsworth story. One of the first articles she wrote about him had the headline, Elon Musk doesn't care about you. She knows a lot about Tesla and how its owner behaves. But I've come to Lynette for a very specific reason. For a while, she became the story, rather than

just reporting on it. And it was all because of a Tesla engineer called Martin Tripp. Can you just tell me a bit about who Martin Tripp was? Martin Tripp was a line worker in the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada. And he was building parts. He noticed that quite a lot of those parts were defective as Tesla was trying to ramp up building the Model 3. This is spring 2018. And so these defective parts would be simply scrapped, thrown into the desert. Now, it's maybe not the sexiest part of this story, but what really bothers Martin is the waste. He also noticed that some of these defective parts were being reworked and put back into

cars and he was just very alarmed by Tesla's just shoddy manufacturing. Tesla has always denied these claims. It says it's one of the most effective and efficient carmakers in the world. And it's true that a lot of Tesla employees really care about what they do. They pride themselves on working for Elon, who they see as a visionary. Martin was like that too, at least at first. A few years before, Musk had asked all Tesla employees to email him directly if they saw any problems. So Martin did just that. And he and his bosses were extremely concerned about this to the point that, you know, they did email and discuss this with Elon Musk, who then said that yes, getting scrapped down

to 1% is a huge goal for Tesla now. But then, nothing changes. So in May 2018, Martin gets in touch with Lynette. Can you just tell me why do you think Tripp reached out to you? What was he trying to accomplish? I think in a way he thought he could help by forcing Musk to see what was going on at the company. Tripp naively kind of thought, well, if I bring this to his attention, something will come of it and we'll see improvements. But that is not how it works with Elon Musk.

Martin sends an email to Lynette. There's some back and forth and they speak on the phone. Did you have any kind of visibility into how aggressively Tesla might go after him? Well, to a certain extent, yes, because Tesla had a line worker, an hourly wage worker, sent an NDA. Everyone signed NDAs. So you could tell that it was a very secretive company. Elon had displayed a little bit of paranoia and he believed he had enemies in the oil and gas industry, that kind of thing. I did know that Tesla was obsessed with secrecy.

The information Martin hands Lynette is enough for her to turn it into a story. On June 4th, 2018, she reports that Tesla is scrapping 40% of the raw materials at the Gigafactory, its huge battery plant in the Nevada desert. It's a pretty niche story that might have gone unnoticed by most people, but it's also the catalyst that will change Martin Tripp's life. Basically, immediately after my first story came out, they were trying to find out who the leaker was. Do you think the investigation into Martin Tripp was normal? trip was normal. It's interesting. I, looking at it now, knowing what I know about what they really did, no, it wasn't normal.

You might look at Elon Musk's posts on Twitter and see him as a free speech champion. But when it comes to someone within his own company speaking to the press, that's a different matter. To Musk, Martin Tripp isn't a whistleblower. He's a threat. He dispatches two senior Tesla security staff called Nick and Jake to get to the truth. Nick and Jake are part of Tesla's senior security team.

Is there a bunch of CIA spooks, former law enforcement officials, and that they're on the ground because essentially Martin Tripp is a bad dude and he's trying to sabotage the company, right? And working alongside these former government agents are people like Carl Hanson. And I was recruited into their internal investigations department. I was informed that Tesla was scaling its internal investigations team. Carl worked for the US military before joining Tesla and superficially his job is similar. But actually it's a bit less sophisticated. Mostly he's looking at CCTV footage, investigating allegations

of theft at the factory, that sort of thing. When it comes to investigating Martin Tripp, Nick and Jake take the lead. After gathering some preliminary evidence, they stick Martin in a room and interview him for several hours over two days. Martin admits what he's done, says he was only trying to help. Four days later, he's fired. And most companies would have left it there. Bigger fish to fry, move on to the next thing. But in a move that is reminiscent to me of Vernon's story, Musk and Tesla, they dig deeper. That's when it starts to get really weird. Now you recall the allegation that Martin Tripp was going to come to the Gigafactory and shoot it up.

Do you recall that? Okay. Yeah. So my involvement began on that day with anything truly related to Martin Tripp. On June 20th, the company sues Tripp for $167 million. In an email exchange shortly afterwards, Musk calls Tripp a horrible human being. And on the same day as the lawsuit, Tesla said it received an anonymous call from a friend of Tripp's

saying he's unstable and armed. And as I was pulling into the facility, my vehicle was flagged down and I saw security personnel running all over it was like something happened and I was told to go inside because Martin Tripp, basically we have an active shooter threat, Martin Tripp is on his way to the Gigafactory threatening to shoot people up and shoot the place up. The company's PR department tells journalists that they're worried Tripp is coming to shoot up the factory. This isn't actually what the anonymous caller says, they just say Tripp is armed and extremely emotional. But that doesn't matter. Thanks to briefings by Tesla and by Elon Musk directly, by the time news of the incident reaches the world's press,

the story is clear. Tripp isn't just upset, he's actively on his way to the factory to shoot the place up. All we know is the phone call was made. Sean Guthro, Tesla's head of security and Carl's boss, phones a team of private investigators which the company had hired earlier to tail Tripp. Tesla might operate a mini-secret service within the walls of its Gigafactory, but Guthro needs a team who can trail Martin outside its gates. The PIs know where Martin is before the police do. He's at a local casino. You don't have any guns on you.

Don't mind if I just pat you down real quick, just go and turn around for me real quick. Alright go ahead and put your hands in smaller bags and under arrest. Just checking your food weapons, okay? Sheriff body cam footage shows the moment police catch up with him. You can hear Martin crying. He's visibly distressed. Nothing else? He's unarmed. He has no idea why he's being searched. Martin tells the sheriff he believes he's unarmed. He has no idea why he's being searched. Martin tells the sheriff he believes

he's being followed. Later on, the police ask Sean Guthrow how he knew where Tripp was before they did. According to a police report, Guthrow replies, Little birds sing. sing. The active shooter incident is unnerving, it's dramatic and eye-catching, almost enough to distract from the more serious allegation about what's happening, allegedly, behind closed doors. On the morning of the active shooter threat, Carl Hanson is tasked with raking through Martin's social media accounts to see if there are

any clues about what he's really up to. Until Carl is told to stand down. But Nick and Jake have a team on Martin Tripp right now. They know where he is. They've been telling him. They've hacked his computers and phones. Now he tells me this. They were saying, don't bother checking the public stuff because we've got access to something better. At that point, yeah. And that's not the end of it. They were literally doing real time watching and capturing communications that Martin Tripp was making while they were doing this surveillance on him and they also initiated a team to follow him around. After Tesla sues him, Martin gets a lawyer and counter sues.

His lawsuit doesn't contain any allegations that his phone might have been hacked. That changes when Carl gives a deposition in Martin's case, about a year later. A deposition is basically when a witness gives evidence before a trial. In his deposition, Carl says Musk's investigators secretly gained access to Martin's phone, that they were able to read personal messages from his wife in real time. It's the first time that Martin has heard this. If such claims are true, it seems like a clear example of where investigators working for Musk pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable and may even have broken the law.

Tesla, Nick, Jake and Elon Musk all strongly deny that any unlawful interception took place or that any wrongdoing occurred. Carl's testimony is pretty shocking. But there is a problem. He wasn't in the room when this alleged hacking took place. He kept hearing about things that were happening, but he has no hard evidence. It's a he said she said type of story. Except for one thing. The same guy who was in charge of investigating Tripp, Carl Hanson's supervisor, the former soldier, Sean Guthro, became a whistleblower.

This is a video deposition given by Sean Guthrow. It has never been made public before. Like Carl, Sean gives evidence in Martin's case before launching his own lawsuit against Tesla. But unlike Carl, Sean is in the room for many of the key decisions. Sean says that as soon as Tesla suspects that Martin is talking to the press, the company's investigators begin to follow him. There was more of understanding his pattern of movement, where he was located, you know, understanding when he came in and off the site. That was my responsibility before things started to heat up in Escalade. This is what Sean and the team around him were doing both when Martin was still an employee

at Tesla but also in the days after he left. Was Mr. Tripp ever followed by any Tesla personnel? Yes. What was your, were you involved in arranging for a personal investigator to follow Mr. Tripp? Yes. My responsibility was to stay in communication with the PI team and if there's anything of significance then whether it's through the radio or through cell phone, right, I was to call Jeff or call Nick with the update of anything of that nature. Sean says he can't remember the name of the investigations company, but he does remember

how the operation worked. But there are three to four different individuals and there was a shift by shift basis that they would do. Four investigators on one target, following him around wherever he went. And was that 24 hours a day? Yes. Did, did, was he surveilled while he was at work? No.

It was just when he left work? That's correct. When I stop and think about this for a second, it's pretty extraordinary. If Martin Tripp worked for any other company and started posting messages on Twitter. Elon Musk would be the first to defend his right to do so. And yet the cost trip works for Tesla. Musk does everything he can to shut him down, including, allegedly, keeping tabs on him 24 hours a day. Elon Musk directed everything. Nobody will convince me to this day that Elon Musk did not. It's not clear to me why Tesla put so much effort into putting Martin Tripp under surveillance.

Maybe Musk thought that Tripp was communicating with short sellers, people betting against a company he'd sweated blood to build. Whatever the motivation, the surveillance against Tripp was extensive. I've seen documents suggesting the whole operation cost a cool half a million dollars. And in his deposition, Sean Guthrow is prepared to reveal more details about how the operation allegedly worked. You said monitoring of his devices. And is that what you were talking about, some images in the room next to where Mr Tripp was being interviewed? Correct. This was back when Martin was under investigation in the days before he was fired.

He was being grilled by a member of Tesla's HR team, and Sean Guthrow says that he was sat in the room next door with the rest of Tesla's senior security team. Sean says that as soon as Martin got a break from the HR interview, he would send emails or text messages from his personal phone, including messages to his wife. Now can you describe for me what the room looked like? How was the room situated? Essentially what I was seeing was like a fuzzy, like it wasn't a fuzzy image but it was a

an image of what looked like a the background of an application of a phone. And it was almost like it was an interface where you can click on things and open things up and then when the text messages were there you can actually see there'd be a delay but you could see the text messages that were coming in after the fact. Emails, the notification bars popping up, things like that. So I wasn't paying attention or staring too hard at it but that was what was going on. How do you know it was Mr. Tripp's emails and text messages? Because the name of his wife was brought up, we also were seeing emails that were coming

from him, we also did see the emails to Bloomberg, there was also a point in time where we saw pictures of his kid, so it was, so that, you know, that's how I knew." Sean Guthrow is clear that he doesn't know for sure that Tripp's phone is being capped. His position is that the messages he saw, including personal messages, strongly suggest that this is the case. Tesla strongly denies that any hacking or any illegal or disproportionate activity took place. The company has said Guthro was let go for poor performance, including repeated failure to demonstrate and understand best practices in the security industry. This concludes the video deposition of Sean Guthro on May 29th, 2019.

We're off the video record. Monopoly Double Play is back at McDonald's, and it's easy to get into the win. First, you peel on pack. This is me winning a Universal theme park vacation! Then again in app. And me, in a new Chevrolet Equinox RS. There are millions of prizes, including a chance to win cash every minute in the app. Cash doesn't make any noise, but it's awesome!

Get into the game with Monopoly Double Play at McDonald's. every minute in the app. I'm Indra Varma and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Klaus Fuchs, the spy who started the Cold War. It's the 1940s, and Britain hopes to beat the Nazis by making an atom bomb. But there's a traitor in the ranks. Klaus Fuchs. A German nuclear physicist and communist who is secretly working for the Soviet Union. Follow the Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts. Both Martin and Sean have settled their claims against Tesla.

Martin admitted accessing private information and paid Tesla an undisclosed sum. Sean's settlement is under seal. I can't see what it says and he didn't respond to any requests for comment. In Karl Hanson's case, his own case against Tesla was dismissed. So we were forced into arbitration? Sean also had to use an arbitrator in his case against Tesla. That's because the company makes it very hard for any Tesla employee to sue it in open court. Unlike a public court case which anyone can attend, arbitrations happen in private and any judgement known as an arbitration award will usually be kept secret between the parties. Some people argue that

arbitrations are cheaper and quicker than a full court case but to its critics the process allows a company like Tesla to keep details of alleged wrongdoing from getting out. They say the arbitration allows Elon Musk to keep criticism sealed behind closed doors. And it's just how he operates. And I think he believes he is above the law, beyond reproach, and that nobody can touch him. Martin Tripp is now living in another part of America. He's hundreds of miles away from the Gigafactory.

He's got a young daughter. He's hundreds of miles away from the Gigafactory. He's got a young daughter. He's divorced. He's trying to get on with his life. But he continues to be hounded by Musk's lawyers. Last year, weighed down with debt, Martin declared bankruptcy. At the court hearing for his bankruptcy, Musk sent expensive lawyers to object. He didn't want Martin to get out of paying the company a penny of its settlement.

Martin didn't sleep well. Martin's life was basically ruined. You know, Elon Musk knew that Tripp didn't have the means to fight him legally, financially. But Elon didn't care. He wanted to drop the hammer on this guy as an example to everyone else who work at Tesla of what would happen to you if you talked to the media about what was going on there. As for Lynette, the reporter who broke

the Martin Tripp story, she says she was in the firing line too. After her piece was published, Musk falsely accused her on Twitter of being on the payroll of short sellers who were betting against Tesla, basically being paid to sabotage the company. Four years later, when Musk took over Twitter, he suspended Lynette from the platform, she says, for the simple act of reporting on Elon Musk. All of these claims fed into the way I was coming to think about Musk. As someone who tries hard to control information at the same time as he professes to defend

it. Forced arbitration, millions spent on investigators, public criticism of your enemies on Twitter, was it all part of the same mindset? A billionaire who can't let go, who can't let grudges drop, and who demands control over everything around him, whether inside his companies or out. Coming up on Elon's Spies… We got an anonymous tip that said essentially there's a young football player who's been spotted leaving Amber Heard's rented accommodation.

But do you suspect that he might have accessed your messages on Twitter? Well I'm certain. I'm certain he absolutely does and I'm certain he scours anybody who he scours. It makes sense to conclude that someone working on behalf of Elon Musk procured that information and passed it back to him. I can't say for sure, like from my experience, but if you lay out the pieces, there aren't that many different ways it could go. When we contacted Orion Investigations, they told us that they were a well-regarded commercial investigations company. They are happy that the company acted ethically

at all times in relation to Mr. Unsworth, who the firm regards as a genuine hero. Elon's Spies is presented by me, Alexi Mostros. It's co-written by me and Gary Marshall, who is also the series producer. Original composition and sound design by Tom Kinsella. Podcast artwork is by John Hill. This episode was fact-checked by Xavier Greenwood. The executive producer is Kerry Thomas. TORTUS First, you peel on pack. This is me winning a universal theme park vacation! Then, again in app. And me, in a new Chevrolet Equinox RS. There are millions of prizes, including a chance to win cash every minute in the app.

Cash doesn't make any noise, but it's awesome! Get into the game with Monopoly Double Play at McDonald's. While supplies last, one in five chances to win GameCube prizes at outset, chances to win Double Play prizes based on time of code entry and draw prizes based on number of entries in each draw. See rules in app. I'm Indra Varma, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Klaus Fuchs, the spy who started the Cold War. It's the 1940s, and Britain hopes to beat the Nazis by making an atom bomb.

But there's a traitor in the ranks, Klaus Fuchs, a German nuclear physicist and communist who is secretly working for the Soviet Union. Follow the Spy Who now, wherever you listen to podcasts.