| From the article: > Tesla fired Tripp on June 19. > The following day, news of the lawsuit hit the internet. Tripp Googled himself and saw a story titled, “Martin Tripp: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know,” which said he lived in a rental apartment in nearby Sparks, Nev. Panicked about who might come find him, he sent an email to Musk. “You have what’s coming to you for the lies you have told to the public and investors,” he wrote. > His former boss, of course, engaged him with gusto. “Threatening me only makes it worse for you,” Musk replied. Later, he wrote: “You should be ashamed of yourself for framing other people. You’re a horrible human being.” > “I NEVER ‘framed’ anyone else or even insinuated anyone else as being involved in my production of documents of your MILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF WASTE, Safety concerns, lying to investors/the WORLD,” Tripp responded. “Putting cars on the road with safety issues is being a horrible human being!” As Martin Tripp was emailing Musk, and Musk was emailing him, Musk made up a story about him coming to Tesla to shoot people: > The anonymous shooting tip was called in to a Tesla call center a few hours later; then Gouthro relayed it to the Storey sheriff’s office. Tesla also printed out a BOLO flyer—short for “be on the lookout”—with Tripp’s smiling face on it and the words “do not allow on property.” > After Gouthro had called the sheriff, he made a second call—to the private investigators he says Tesla kept on retainer, asking them to find Tripp. The PIs found Tripp before the police did, tracking him to the Nugget casino in Reno. Gouthro says his boss told him not to tell the cops that Tesla had Tripp followed. > Meanwhile, Musk emailed a reporter at the Guardian: “I was just told that we received a call at the Gigafactory that he was going to come back and shoot people,” Musk wrote. “I hope you all are safe,” the reporter replied. The call said nothing about a shooter. That was made up wholesale by Tesla and Musk. Higher ups at Tesla told subordinates to call the police with this claim that Musk made to reporters. Tesla refused to let the cops interview or investigate further on the situation, and the sheriff reiterates that the call Tesla claims they got said nothing about a shooter, despite Musk's insistence that he was coming to shoot up the place: > Gerald Antinoro is the sheriff, and he looks the part, dressed in black cowboy boots, a black denim jacket, and black Wranglers, with a pistol on his hip. In an interview in his office months after the incident, he still seems both mystified and amused by the Tesla shooting threat. The sheriff says that when he’d looked into the anonymous call after police confronted Tripp, the threat seemed less threatening than the company made it sound. The caller said Tripp was volatile but didn’t say he was on his way to shoot up the place. “You remember playing telephone as a kid?” Antinoro asks. “It got blown out of proportion.” He dropped the investigation when Tesla declined to make available a colleague of Tripp’s who might have called in the tip. Even after the sheriff told the company that the threat was fake, they continued to insist that Martin Tripp was a mass shooter: > To Antinoro, one of the strangest parts of the situation was that after he told the company the threat was false, it asked him to put out a press release hyping it. He declined, but Tesla publicized the incident anyway. The morning after the threat was debunked, a spokesman texted another reporter: "Yesterday afternoon we received a phone call from a friend of Mr. Tripp telling us that Mr. Tripp would be coming to the Gigafactory to 'shoot the place up.'" |