Musk is not a champion of the environment. And Tesla is a massive polluter.
Elon Musk made big promises to Wall Street about Tesla’s TSLA new Model Y SUV in 2022, and the company was ramping up its production in Austin, Texas, when environmental problems threatened to derail his plans.
The door to the plant’s giant casting furnace, which melts metal to be molded into the Model Y’s parts, wouldn’t shut, spewing toxins into the air and raising temperatures for workers on the floor to as high as 100 degrees. Hazardous wastewater from production—containing paint, oil and other chemicals—was also flowing untreated into the city’s sewer, in violation of state guidelines.
Tesla left the costly problems largely unaddressed during the critical ramp-up. As a result, the company’s 10 million-plus square foot plant—among the largest car factories in the world—dumped toxic pollutants into the environment near Austin for months.
A Journal investigation shows that Tesla bosses were aware of the problems but sometimes chose short-term fixes to avoid slowing production. Former employees said they feared they might lose their job if they drew attention internally to potential environmental hazards, because senior managers didn’t consider such issues to be mission critical. As head of the company, Musk set the tone, these people said, pushing employees to move fast and complaining frequently in public statements that unnecessary regulations are strangling the U.S.
He has said the mission of Tesla, which is the largest maker of electric cars in the U.S., is to “protect life on Earth.” Yet across his business empire, Musk’s companies show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again, federal and state government filings and documents show.
Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., facility has accumulated more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California, according to a Journal analysis of informal enforcement actions in the EPA’s compliance database. It is second only to a refinery owned by oil-and-gas behemoth Chevron, which is in nearby Richmond.
One environmental-compliance staffer in the Austin plant claimed that “Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls,” according to a 2024 memo from the employee to the EPA that was reviewed by the Journal.
The staffer sent the detailed memo alleging environmental violations at Tesla to the EPA. The memo, including hundreds of pages of state regulatory documents, as well as photos and videos, was reviewed by the Journal. The EPA’s criminal-enforcement division and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality earlier this month opened a preliminary inquiry related to the former Tesla staffer’s allegations, according to people familiar with the matter.
Multiple employees left Tesla without severance pay after declining to sign nondisclosure agreements to keep quiet about their work for the company, including environmental and other noncompliance issues they witnessed, people familiar with the negotiations said.
Tesla has continued to draw the attention of regulators. On June 4, 2024, Austin Water regulators notified Tesla that it had violated its permit with the city when it discharged to the sewer system more than 9,000 gallons of wastewater that wasn’t properly treated for pH, according to documents released under public-records requests. On Aug. 30, 2024, TCEQ notified Tesla of five violations, including exceeding its permitted emissions limit for certain air pollutants and not disclosing deviations, according to the documents.
Some environmental engineers and others at Tesla were fretting about a roughly six-acre, triangular-shaped “evaporation” pond Tesla built to hold wastewater from construction, chemical spills and its paint shop.
The pond was filled with toxins, including sulfuric and nitric acids, and the algae-colored water had begun to smell of rotten eggs, former employees said. At one point, employees found a dead deer in the water, they said. For a time, Tesla discharged untreated pond water directly into the sewer system without permission from Austin Water, the water utility for the city, according to former employees and emails from regulators.
Sometimes during rainstorms, Tesla discharged a sludgy mix of mud and chemicals from occasional spills outside the plant, turning a ¾ mile stretch of the Colorado River into a mucky brown slick, according to pictures and videos viewed by the Journal.
Even when it wasn’t raining, the Gigafactory generated vast amounts of industrial wastewater as it built cars—about 500,000 gallons a day, currently according to the water utility—and like most companies it was required to obey certain rules in disposing of it.
Throughout the day, water flowed from across the factory into three large tanks, where much of the contamination was supposed to be filtered out before being released into the local sewer system.
The company had assured regulators multiple times that its system was working, according to state regulators and emails reviewed by the Journal. But the system wasn’t completely separating out pollutants, according to former employees and an April 2022 email reviewed by the Journal.
On Sept. 20, Austin Water issued two notices of violations to Tesla for exceeding the pH limit in its permit, according to state regulators and emails to Tesla provided by the city of Austin under a public information request.
Problems mounted a few days later when an outside lab that Tesla hired to test its wastewater notified environmental staff that the company had exceeded its permit level for zinc, according to the memo and former employees.
Environmental staff notified Austin Water, but one member refused to comply with a request from Tesla managers to lobby the regulator not to consider the violation as a “significant non-compliance,” according to the memo.
In late November, Tesla again urged the environmental staffer to reach out to Austin Water. The staffer refused.
That same week, Tesla fired the staffer for “pushing back on their requests” according to the memo.
Musk is a brilliant person, but he is also a proven liar and a cheat.
I am all for reducing ridiculous regulations. Moreover, labeling carbon dioxide as a pollutant is more than a bit of a stretch.
But I draw the line at releasing toxic sludge into rivers and ignoring safety issues on furnace doors.
Given that Elon Musk is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, I see no reason for Tesla’s environmental policies. There is no excuse for these sickening actions.
OK Elon, it’s time to cleanup DOGE, and eliminate government waste.
But how about cleaning up your Tesla plants first? Can’t you afford it? Isn’t $333 billion enough?
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget has a nice interactive site that lets you adjust exemptions and set tax rates. Have a go at it. Click above to see whaty I suggest.