Over 100GB of confidential data has been leaked by a Tesla whistleblower to a German media company called Hondel's Blot. The 23,000-plus files contain salary information, private addresses of more than 100,000 current and former employees. Elon Musk's Social Security number was found in there too, so I guess go ahead and open up a bunch of fake credit cards and Elon's name and go and buy yourself a bunch of free stuff in Minecraft. Names, phone numbers, vens, and in some cases, the bank account information of some of Tesla's customers was leaked as well. So if you've got one of those fancy electric cars sitting in your driveway, then this fancy German media company might have your information. Now, obviously, this is a huge data breach incident for Tesla, probably the biggest one to date. And according to this German paper, it would have also violated the GDPR, which means that Tesla could be fined up to 4% of its annual sales, which is about $3.5 billion. And that's also more than double the current record GDPR fine of $1.2 billion that Meta just had to pay after they were found guilty in an Irish court for transferring EU user data out of the EU to the US. Now, a lawyer from Tesla reached out to this company with a threatening letter saying, you have informed us that you were in receipt of stolen Tesla confidential information, including Tesla and our business partners trade secrets and Tesla employees personal data per your May 10th email. We continue to investigate the circumstances alleged in your email. To date, we have reason to believe that a disgruntled ex employee right before he left Tesla misused his access as a service technician to exfiltrate information in violation of his signed non-disclosure agreement. Tesla's data management policies and practices and EU in German law. Tesla rigorously protects its confidential information and the personal information of its employees and customers. We intend to initiate legal proceedings against this individual for his theft of Tesla confidential information and employees personal data. We also want to cooperate with criminal authorities in this matter. To be clear, the information that you claim was shared with you could only have been done so in violation of at least Tesla's non-disclosure agreements and policies, data management policies and practices and EU in German law. Tesla continues to investigate and will pursue legal claims against anyone who themselves or through solicitation, steals, misuses, or otherwise misappropriates Tesla confidential information or the personal data of its employees and business partners. As you know, use of illegally obtained data for media reporting is not allowed absent exceptional circumstances. The possession of such data itself without a proper justification breaches among other things data protection law and mishandling this information, subjects recipients such as handles blood to liability for violation of trade secrets, data protection law, and handling stolen data among other things. Any such sensitive data in your possession also requires you to protect it carefully against further misappropriation. To this end, please send us a copy of this information, immediately delete all of your copies, and confirm with us that you've done so. Sincerely, Joseph Am, Managing Council for Litigation, Tesla Inc. So, Tesla is pretty much claiming that this leak is the result of an inside job, but that still begs the question of why this one particular service technician would have access this much access to this much unencrypted data on employees, customers, and even Elon himself. Now, as far as I can tell, this data is not publicly available. I haven't found any links to it on the dark web hacker forums, but that's not to say that it's not floating around on there or anywhere else. I just wasn't able to find it, and even if I did, it would have taken me days to download on my internet connection. But the Handlesblood Media Company's website, they have a page where you can go and enter in the VIN of your vehicle, or if you are an employee of Tesla, you can enter in your employee ID to see what information about you was in the leak. And the editors at Handlesblood, they have a dedicated email that you can get in touch with them at if you discover that your information was in the leak through this search. Now, I'm not a Tesla owner, or an employee of Tesla. I don't even have any of Tesla's stock, so I'm not personally affected by the data that's in this leak, but what does affect me, and not just me, but all of us that drive, are the thousands of customer complaints that were leaked in this data breach that do not seem to have really been addressed by Tesla. According to Handlesblood, the Tesla files have over 3,000 entries of customer complaints, and that's just about the autopilot system. Now, in a way, customer complaints about the full self-driving ability of Tesla's really should be expected, since Elon Musk told investors that we would have self-driving Teslas by 2020. He told us that parking would also be revolutionized, because instead of your car just sitting in a parking spot for eight hours while you sleep or while you're at work, the RoboCar could be making you money by giving autonomous rides to other people like a full self-driving Uber. So if I was a Tesla owner, I would be complaining about my car, not paying for itself through some kind of autonomous ride sharing app, but a lot of these complaints with the autopilot are people complaining about almost dying. The files include detailed descriptions of more than 1,000 crashes occurring in Tesla's that were manufactured from 2015 to 2022. There's more than 2,400 complaints about sudden acceleration with self-driving and more than 1,500 complaints about breaking problems. The leak reveals that these vehicles have some serious issues and worse than the problems that the vehicles are having themselves are how Tesla tried to cover up these problems and leave no paper trail of them. The leaked files allegedly contain precise guidelines for Tesla employees to follow when communicating with customers. The employees were told not to put any of their incident reviews in writing unless lawyers were involved if the customer was already getting litigious, they were told to keep everything verbal, only do reviews of problems with the autopilot or reviews of any problems that the Teslas were having over the phone with the customers directly. Don't even leave your review recorded on their voicemail. In many of the customers who did receive written responses were just getting these boilerplate responses saying that, oh, the autopilot was functioning normally and the issues you're having are because you didn't understand what you were doing. You need to just go and reread the manual. And what this tells me is that Tesla is really in over their heads with this self-driving thing. It's probably the most well-known example at this point in history of over-promising and under-delivering. And this type of data leak tells me that it's going to be a long way off from getting better because Tesla's stock has been doing poorly. They could potentially be facing the largest GDPR fine in history. Elon himself seems to be more focused with doing things with Starlink and with Twitter. And if all of this information about Tesla ignoring customer complaints regarding the safety of full self-driving is true, then it could be used as ammunition in the dozens of wrongful death civil suits that they have open against them. But let me know what you guys think. Does this car company have a lot of dark days ahead of them? Or do you think Elon is going to be able to spin this in his favor? I mean, after all, he does control Twitter, which probably has way more reach than the fancy German media company and really all these other media companies that are reporting on it combined. So let me know your thoughts in the comments below. 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