Tesla’s former ingeniousness, Christina Balan, who was dismissed in 2014, said in an interview that her entire team had been threatened to deport her side when she raised a brake security problem directly to Elon Musk. She has now succeeded in throwing Tesla’s arbitration file against her and hopes to meet Tesla directly in an open hearing in a case that could influence business policy.
Christina Balan is an ingenious Romanian origin who previously worked for Tesla on the S model. Her contributions were important enough for her initials to appear on the Model S. battery.
But in 2014, she mentioned what she considered a security problem directly with Elon Musk. She believed that the floor carpets of the S model could cause a brake safety problem, similar to a situation that Toyota had recently crossed (although this also led to a media fire storm that exploded the problem). She said Tesla had chosen suppliers according to friendships, not quality.
And she mentioned it directly to Musk because … he told her. Famous, in 2013, Musk sent an email to the whole company by declaring:
Whoever to Tesla can and must send an email / talk to someone else depending on what he thinks is the fastest way to solve a problem for the benefit of the whole business. You can talk to the manager of your manager without his permission, you can speak directly to a VP in another department, you can talk to me, you can talk to someone without someone else’s permission. In addition, you should consider yourself forced to do it until the right thing happens.
-Elon musk, e-mail to all Tesla employees, March 21, 2013
A few days after sending this email, Balan said that he was offered a meeting with Musk, but that when she presented himself in Reunion, he was rather assisted by a lawyer and great men in uniforms, and with Tesla forcing her to resign.
During this meeting, Balan said that Tesla’s lawyer threatened to expel many members of his team, who were currently waiting for the requests for a green card, if she did not resign, apparently in response to her team that supported her to raise these concerns. She ended up signing the resignation to protest, by writing on it that “I resign for the post that I was put a month ago because I dare to speak to the management of the SR, as well as people of British Columbia who had the chance to speak were threatened …”
When the Balan case obtained coverage at the Huffington Post in 2017, Tesla sent a statement that Balan had stolen business resources to work on a “secret” personal project (Tesla’s emails show that Balan was invited to work on this project by Leadership). After that, Balan says that she had a hard time finding work like companies feared to end up on the black list of Musk.
Balan put an action in defamation on the press release, but Tesla forced her case to arbitration and had the pursuit of defamation reject. Forced arbitration is widely used by American companies to find faster and more suitable decisions for businesses, an approach that has only become common than after the “Supreme” court.
Balan then appealed this decision, and after many delays (some linked to her fight against breast cancer, which is now in remission), she finally succeeded in having arbitration expelled on Monday – even if she represented herself, proFor most procedures.
His victory could be important for business policy at the national level, because it could be used to cool the overuse of arbitration which is considered by most observers as giving disproportionate power to businesses in disputes. However, given the nature of the recent conclusion of the Court, which has proven to be a jurisdictional question, this decision cannot be directly applicable to many other arbitration cases.
Now Balan wants to face Tesla open with her case, and hopes to bring her history to the public more – which she says that Musk tried to prevent her from doing, despite her claims from being “freedom of absolute expression”.
She said it in an interview this weekend with The Times UK, a media organization belonging to the Denier Climate Rupert Murdoch, who is also the father of James Murdoch, a member of the board of directors of Tesla.
In the interview, Balan describes working conditions under Musk and that he was a mainly absent CEO who only presented himself at the office twice a month, would threaten or retaliate against those who tried to solve problems. She says she wants to take her case to open the court “to prove how vindicative this monster is. He is evil of evil … He likes to hurt people … and you do not know for them because he forces everyone to give up his freedom of expression and their right to continue. “
You can look at the whole interview below:
Electrek taking
We have not written on the swing affair before because it has been so long to come and filled with various arcanic legal keys. There will probably be more stages to come, many of which are boring legal maneuvers, but perhaps this case will now have the possibility of becoming more public now than the arbitration decision has been returned.
And, frankly, I think that the initial complaint on the floor carpets was probably not so important to a blockbuster. At the time, the floor carpets concentrated a lot due to the very publicized nature of the Toyota affair (which was also overestimated), so I think that the banish team was probably more suspicious than usual. And we have not continued to see a list of floor mat problems with the S model since.
However, Tesla’s response to raise the security problem is always unacceptable (to say the least). Not only were all employees invited to take measures like this to solve the problems by the CEO himself, but the strong nature of a rapid shot in response, then threatening his deportation team is beyond the pale.
Although we only have the words of swing as proof of the threat of expulsion, we have since seen Musk take vindictive actions against entire teams and given his anti-immigrant attitudes, including the desire to deport people illegally.
Recently, Musk dismissed the entire super cargo team, in what was probably the most stupid commercial decision that Tesla has ever taken, apparently because Rebecca Tinucci, a star in the automotive industry and Tesla’s most successful team, refused to dismiss more people.
(By the way, another Tesla director for a long time who was dismissed at the same time as the entire super-cargeur team, Daniel Ho, had previously congratulated Balan, saying: “Without creative engineers like you, this place would only be another automotive company”)
And Musk is also the largest financial support of an administration which currently illegally expelled American citizens to a prison famous for blows, overcrowding and deprivation of food that some have called a place to “have people without officially applying the death penalty”.
He has spent a large part of his public plea in recent years showing racist and anti-immigrant attitudes, including support for German neonazis and agreed to defend Hitler’s actions in the holocaust. He focuses more on the push of his white supremacist opinions than on everything related to electric vehicles and climate change (from which he is now pushing denial), thus working against Tesla’s mission.
Thus, making threats of deportation against immigrants does not seem out of character, although Musk is an immigrant formerly “illegal” himself.
Be that as it may, we look forward to knowing more about this case as you go, in the hope that it can both elucidate more for the public what the real Elon Musk looks like, and possibly do something to reduce, very slightly, the abuse of the business arbitration system.
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