Tesla CEO Elon Musk has drawn criticism from all angles over his involvement with Donald Trump’s White House as the government presses forward with its deportation and cost-cutting efforts, but one of his former employees alleges that he may have been eying immigration status as a way to exact revenge on his naysayers years earlier. A Tesla engineer who was fired in 2014 said that Musk threatened to deport her entire team when she raised a braking safety issue to him directly.
Christina Balan was fired in 2014 and recently said in an interview that she told Musk about an issue with the Model S’ floor mats that could cause a braking safety problem, similar to the one Toyota had dealt with years earlier. Balan took the issue directly to Musk after he sent a company-wide email that read, “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, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission.”
Balan was offered a meeting with Musk after her email, but she was greeted by lawyers and others, and ultimately left the meeting after resigning from her position. She said that the attorneys threatened to deport members of her team who were in the process of obtaining green cards if she didn’t sign the resignation. She signed the document, saying that “I’m resigning for the position that I was put in a month ago bc I dare to speak up to the Sr management, also bc people that had the chance to speak up were threatened.”
Tesla tried to force Balan’s suit into arbitration, but last week, she was successful in having that motion denied. She now wants to take the case to court, saying she wants to prove “how vindictive this monster is.”
[Images: Tesla]
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