He once saved Tesla, but Tesla later ruined him.

An anonymous message pries open the cracks in a corporate empire

On November 4, 2022, it was an ordinary Friday.

On the desktop of Sönke Iwersen, an investigative reporter at *Handelsblatt*, a Microsoft Teams call request popped up. The caller was his Tokyo-based colleague who he had not contacted for several months.

"A stranger called me, saying he works at Tesla in Norway and warned that there are serious problems inside the company. Would you like to talk to him?"

Sönke certainly agreed.

The stranger was extremely cautious. No phone calls, no emails, he only used an end-to-end encrypted communication app called "Signal". No real name, only an ID.

Twelve minutes later, Sönke's mobile phone vibrated.

"Hello, I got your ID from Martin. Did I reach the right person?"

"Yes, it's me."

Ten minutes later, the other party sent the first document.

"This is the data sheet of dismissed employees."

Then the second, the third. One of them was an Excel file over 30 megabytes. Sönke had never seen such a large spreadsheet before. He unzipped and opened it —

Row 72999.

The names, hire dates, work emails, private addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers of more than 70,000 Tesla employees... All laid out completely in plain sight.

"Are these files accessible to everyone?" Sönke asked.

"Yes," the other party replied, "Anyone can search them. I asked a trusted colleague to test it, and he could also access them."

Sönke leaned back in his chair, with only one thought in his mind: If this is true, it will be a story that rewrites Tesla's myth.

But he did not know at that time that the sender of this anonymous message was once a life-saving hero of Tesla.

In 2019, he put out the fire with his bare hands, and Elon Musk personally thanked him

Let's go back to the spring of 2019. There was an auto show in Lillestrøm, Norway.

A brand new Tesla Model 3 suddenly caught fire. Flames burst out from the engine compartment, just a few steps away from the unsuspecting visitors. Once the fire spread to the lithium battery under the vehicle, the consequences would be disastrous — pouring water on it might release hydrogen and trigger an explosion.

A technician in work overalls rushed up.

He had no fire extinguisher, no protective gear. He just reached his hand into the scalding engine compartment, wrapped his fingers in his shirt sleeve, and yanked out the burning power amplifier.

His name is Lucas Krupski. His fingers were severely burned, but the disaster was prevented.

Two days later, he received an email from Elon Musk:

"Thank you and congratulations on defusing the crisis!"

Lucas replied: "I just did the right thing."

At that moment, he thought he had finally walked into the company of his dreams. He called himself a "disciple of Musk", believing that Tesla was changing the world, and he was helping the company get better.

But he never expected — this "credit" would become the beginning of his nightmare.

The more problems he found, the further the company drifted away from him

Lucas was a meticulous person.

He could see risks everywhere: too few fire extinguishers, employees modifying safety components without authorization, vehicles parked too close so that sparks from polishing could splash onto another car at any time.

He reported to the manager, but no one cared. So he wrote a second email directly to Musk.

Musk replied: "Okay, please let me know if there are other things we should do."

Lucas thought his voice had been heard. But his supervisor soon learned about this, and grilled him sharply: "Who do you think you are?"

What followed was like a thriller that slowly lost control.

His work computer began to lag abnormally. He pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del and found that a program named Code42 was consuming more than half of the processing power — it was the spy software specially used by the company to monitor "internal threats".

He was transferred from his original post, thrown into the basement of the distribution center, and was no longer allowed to communicate with his former colleagues. The management sent him an official warning, accusing him of "spending too much time verifying whether things are correct".

Colleagues began to avoid him. Some said he was "uncooperative" and "untrustworthy". Someone quietly told him: "You have been marked."

In September 2020, Lucas fainted at work and was sent to the emergency room.

He took sick leave and then began to receive psychotherapy.

When there was nowhere to appeal for justice, he chose the last resort

Lucas did not give up. He resigned, but refused to leave.

He began to open the laptop that had been monitored countless times by Tesla at night, log in to the company's IT system, and search. He was surprised to find that he could open all the files marked "Confidential" and "Top Secret".

Social security numbers of 70,000 employees around the world. Supplier contracts. Expense invoices for Musk's personal bodyguards. The secret investigation order of the Austrian Prosecutor's Office on the fugitive Wirecard executive.

He even found an internal report on autonomous driving system failures — more than 2,400 cases of unintended acceleration, more than 1,500 cases of phantom braking, and hundreds of fatal collisions. Tesla's technology is far from as safe as Musk boasted.

Lucas did not hesitate. He copied these data one by one. It was not hacking — he just used the permissions of a service technician to open those files that should never have been accessible to him.

Then he contacted the regulatory authorities. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, the German Federal Commissioner... He wrote one whistleblower letter after another.

All sank into the sea.

No one responded to him.

Until he found Sönke Iwersen, the reporter from *Handelsblatt*.

19GB of data, a war against a giant

In December 2022, Sönke flew to Drammen, Norway.

It was snowing that day. Lucas drove a huge Land Rover to pick him up. In the restaurant, Lucas finally said the words that had been hidden in his heart for many years:

"Musk has hurt many people, exploiting and deceiving them. He has pushed dangerous software and hardware onto the roads. I stopped the fire in 2019 and saved his business, but in return, he destroyed my life."

A few hours later, they sat in the lobby of a hotel. Lucas's friend — the Greek technician who still worked at Tesla — opened his laptop and logged in to the Jira system.

Sönke casually typed a word: "Prosecutor's Office".

A file popped up on the screen. It was from the Vienna Prosecutor's Office, requiring Tesla to provide GPS data of an Austrian member of parliament's vehicle — the MP was suspected of helping the fugitive former Wirecard director Jan Marsalek.

A technician at the lowest level could casually search for confidential information of this level.

Sönke later wrote: "I could hardly believe my eyes."

That night, Lucas handed him a hard drive.

"Which data do you want?"

Sönke said: "All your data."

19GB. Equivalent to the capacity of a full-length documentary.

The cost of being a hero: raid, isolation, and being smeared

Lucas's identity was soon exposed.

On June 1, 2023, Norwegian police knocked on his door with a search warrant. Five people rummaged through his two-bedroom apartment and took away all his mobile phones, computers, and storage devices.

He sat on the bed, numb all over. There was only one thought in his mind:

How on earth did I get involved in this struggle with Elon Musk?

Tesla did not stop. Its Security Intelligence and Investigations team — composed of former CIA officials and digital forensics experts — classified Lucas as "Case No. 23-0081", categorized as "media leak". They tracked every access record of his and locked his account.

Lucas was completely isolated. The Greek colleague who helped him retrieve the data cut off contact. His lawyer backed down at a critical moment. He had no job, no savings, and lived alone in a country that did not belong to him.

Tesla described him in the media as a "disgruntled former employee", implying that he extorted and stole company assets.

But he did not delete those data.

He did not bring down Musk, but he did three things

Facing the richest man in the world — a business empire that can mobilize top legal teams, infiltrate regulatory agencies, and even let police break down doors — Lucas had no funds, no background, no allies.

He failed to bring down Musk. No one can "bring down" a person worth hundreds of billions of dollars who is about to move into the White House.

But he did what many people could not do: 

He was not crushed, not silenced, not put in prison.

He won the court judgment and saved his own life.

And — he prompted dozens of regulatory agencies to launch investigations.

Forced Tesla to rewrite its internal data security policy.

Let millions of readers around the world see the documents that were supposed to be hidden in the black box forever.

How did he do it?

This story is the starting point of *Tesla Undercover*

This book is not a biography of Lucas alone.

It is the truth unearthed inch by inch by two investigative reporters from the German *Handelsblatt*, Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden, who spent nearly two years, crossed three continents, interviewed hundreds of people, and dug out from the 19GB of data Lucas handed over to them.

It exposes:

Tesla's internal data protection is virtually non-existent, and the privacy of hundreds of thousands of people circulates freely like public documents;

The mountain of fatal failure reports behind the autonomous driving system, and the promise Musk has never fulfilled in ten years;

A corporate culture that takes "extreme toughness" as its belief, how it crushes, monitors, and then discards employees;

And how Lucas Krupski — an ordinary Polish immigrant, the lowest-level technician in the Norwegian factory — tore a hole in the behemoth with nothing but his unyielding courage.

Lucas did not bring down Musk.  

But he proved one thing: An ordinary person, as long as he uses the right methods and has firm will, can let the light in.

And this beam of light is the book you are reading now.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Sales & Management Plus", published by 36Kr with authorization.