A lawsuit filed by a former Tesla employee claims he was fired from an $18,000-a-month job to help keep investors and the media from learning that thieves were stealing millions of dollars worth of copper wire from its Nevada battery plant.
Lynn Thompson said in the suit that he saw huge amounts of copper being measured, cut, loaded onto pallets and hauled away. The suit said he reported the thefts on multiple occasions to senior management, including CEO Elon Musk, and contractor ONQ Global starting in April 2018.
In June 2018, Thompson said he witnessed copper being loaded onto a truck and contacted Tesla security, who called police. Several days later, management told Thompson that he wasn’t allowed back inside the Gigafactory, the complaint said.
“Since this time, Mr. Thompson has learned that Tesla and Musk pressured ONQ GLOBAL to stop allowing him on the work site and subsequently end his work at Tesla because of the outside reporting to law enforcement and internal reporting to senior management,” Bloomberg quoted the lawsuit as saying. “Tesla was afraid of the information that plaintiff learned and wanted to prevent the information from being disclosed to the media and shareholders.”
Musk said at an internal meeting in June 2018 that $37 million worth of material had gone missing and possibly had been stolen so far that year, according to the suit.