Insider: Tesla Is Breaking Tons of Rules Elon Musk May Slash Under Trump
“Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls,” a whistleblower reportedly wrote to the EPA.
Illustration by Eric Faison/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Elon Musk, tapped to lead Donald Trump’s efforts to slash government spending and gut regulations, pushed employees to work hastily as Tesla piled up pollution violations, according to a report.
The Wall Street Journal obtained emails from Texas regulators to Tesla that allege the MAGA billionaire’s electric carmaker dumped toxic pollutants near Austin, Texas—including untreated wastewater into the city’s sewer.
The Journal also obtained a whistleblower memo sent this year to the Environmental Protection Agency by an environmental-compliance staffer at Tesla’s Austin plant who wrote, “Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls.”
According to the documents obtained by the Journal, in 2022 Tesla dumped untreated wastewater filled with toxins from a 6-acre “evaporation” pond it built into the Austin sewage system without permission from local authorities. Employees at one point had found a dead deer in the pond, which contained sulfuric and nitric acids.
Earlier this year, Tesla was notified by local officials that it violated its municipal permit when it dumped more than 9,000 gallons of wastewater that was not correctly treated for pH, the Journal reported.
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Tesla and Musk did not reply to the Journal’s requests for comment. Tesla did not immediately reply to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
A general view of the construction site of the Tesla Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, U.S., October 25, 2021.
Brian Snyder/Reuters
Musk’s space technology company, SpaceX, was also recently fined by federal regulators for dumping 262,000 gallons of wastewater on Texas wetlands without a permit, something SpaceX has denied.
Sources familiar with Tesla management’s thinking told the Journal that the C-suite at Musk’s biggest company don’t consider environmental rules one of their top concerns.
Former employees told the newspaper that, at the carmaker’s Austin facility, managers have ignored workers who raised environmental concerns. Musk, they said, pushed employees to move fast, creating a management culture seemingly indifferent to the issues that were raised.
Musk has, for months, publicly complained that government regulations are a hindrance to his, and other, businesses.
In September, he tweeted that “America is being slowly strangled to death by an accumulation of millions of regulations.”
Trump plans to let him take a chainsaw to the guardrails he loathes so much, appointing him alongside entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy to lead a commission, the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), that will proposed slashing as much as $2 trillion in government spending.
Ramaswamy suggested they want to “delete” entire government agencies, which could vastly curtail, or practically eliminate, the oversight of certain industries, depending on the extent of the cuts.
After Trump’s victory, Musk tweeted, “We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good.”
The world is suffering slow strangulation by overregulation. Every year, the noose tightens a little more.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 13, 2024
We finally have a mandate to delete the mountain of choking regulations that do not serve the greater good. https://t.co/PJnEA4InAZ
The whistleblower letter sent to the EPA claimed that, in 2022, Tesla engaged in “an elaborate ruse” to make it seem like a faulty furnace door was working fine during a site visit from Texas Commission on Environmental Quality officials.
The door wasn’t closing and was leaking toxins into the air, pushing the floor temperature for factory workers up to 100 degrees. Tesla reduced the amount of fuel going into the furnace and temporarily closed the door, not running it at “actual operating conditions” and securing a passing grade in the process. The problem, they alleged, wasn’t fixed until months later.
Outside Texas, where Tesla has been headquartered since 2021, the carmaker’s Fremont, California, factory violated its air-pollution permits 112 time in the past five years, leading regulators to claim the company has continuously failed to fix equipment to reduce the release of toxic chemicals, the Journal reported, citing the Bay Area Air Quality Management District.
Tesla denies the allegations.
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