September 20, 2025 • 14 mins
Back in 2022, investigative reporter Sönke Iwersen received 100 gigabytes of confidential leaked data from a whistle-blower inside Tesla.
The files detailed dangerous autopilot software errors, a high number of workplace accidents in Tesla’s factories and a culture of fear within the company.
Iwersen's investigation is now a book called The Tesla Files: Inside Elon Musk's Empire of Power and Deception.
"We found, actually, that there had been warnings inside Tesla about this mistake, the level of insecurity - and later, the guy who had warned us about it was later fired for it."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks atb.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
First Up, This'sal we take a look at an expose
on the inside workings of Elon Musks Tesla. Back in
twenty twenty two, investigative reporter Sunka Ivison received one hundred
gigabytes of confidential leaked data from a whistleblower inside Tesla.
The files detailed dangerous autopilot's software errors, a high number
of workplace accidents in Tesla's factories, and a culture of
(00:34):
fear within the company. Sonka's investigation is now a book
called The Tesla Files or Whistleblower, A Leak and a
Fight for Truth, The inside story of Musk's Empire. Sonka
Iverson joins me, now, good morning, Thank you so much
for being with us.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Sure, good morning to you too.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Tell me what were your first thoughts when a colleague
called you and said he'd received a call from a
confidential informer who claimed to have information about serious issues
at Tesla.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Well, I thought it would be nice, but it sounded
too good to be true because he also said that
information was just lying around there and inside Tesla. I
couldn't believe it. But of course, if somebody tells you
he's working at there's a possibility to talk to somebody
at working at Tesla, you have to take it. Because
at the time Tesla was a complete black box and
(01:26):
nobody inside Tesla talked to anybody outside, and so a
great stroke of luck.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
So in a situation like this, how do journal let's
go about checking the integrity of the informer and the
data that you're being offered.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Well, it's a long process. It's At first, he didn't
want to be The problem was he didn't want to
be named. He didn't want to give me his name,
didn't want me to know who he was, exactly where
he was, all those things. But he kept sending data,
I mean one file and another file, not the twenty
(02:03):
three thousand files that we actually came to possess after
a few weeks. But it was so tantalizing the information.
And at the same time I talked to my boss,
I talked to our lawyers, and they said, well, you
have to make sure that this is really You have
to get over there and see him actually pull it
out of the system, because that's what he claimed that
anybody at Tesla could access this top secret information with
(02:28):
no security at all, so we did so. I after
after a couple of weeks, I finally convinced them and
he gave me, so to speak, a display, a performance.
He actually accessed the information in front of me, and
it seemed all true that he could access the information
(02:48):
if you type. He typed in the words Elon Musk,
and hundreds of files came out and I saw the
while the bills of Elon Musk, bodyguards and anything I
asked him to type in it all there was a
receiption reception, and yeah, the then next day we copied
the first nineteen gearbytes or so, and then we started
(03:11):
verifying goals.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So I imagine the thing that struck you first was
the fact that you could actually access or that an
employee could actually access all this information before you even
got to kind of working out what was in the information.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yes, yes, that was the actual first implausibility, because I mean,
Tesla was the most valuable car company in the world,
by far, more valuable than Volkswagen and Mercedes and BMW
and all those together. And Tesla or Masque specifically was
so paranoid. He always said everybody else is out to
(03:49):
get him, the oil industry, the diesel car industry, the politicians,
the media. That's why everybody inside Tesla was told you
must never talk to anybody outside. And when you start
working at Tesla, or started at that time, even when
you had your first into you before you before you
had your first interview, you would have to sign an NDA.
(04:11):
So the level of secrecy was completely, you know, out
out of this world. And then to have that peril
to anybody can access any information at all, that didn't
just didn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Did you get to the bottom of why a take
billionaire was so relaxed with privacy, seeming to have little
protection in place for such highly sensitive information.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
No, it's we never found out how, I mean, why
they wouldn't talk to us. They still haven't answered a
single of our questions. It's just perplexing. And later when
when when when we started, when you know, we went
through looking all of the twenty three thousand, I mean,
(04:58):
imagine how how long that takes. Twenty three thousand documents,
and we had to get each and every one of
them because we couldn't be sure what we were missing.
We were afraid to miss anything. So but then we
found actually that there had been warnings inside Tesla about
this mistake, this completely unsecure the level of insecurity, and
(05:23):
later the actually the guy who had warned about it
was laid a fire for it. So it's just a
very situation that didn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
What else did you find in the files that really
caught your attention?
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Yes, once we got over the circle that why do
we even have the information? We saw what really impressed
us or just our brains went wow, how can this be?
Was all the information about the autopilot, because there were
thousands upon thousands of complaints of customers about their cars
accelerating by themselves, breaking by themselves. That's called unintended acceleration.
(06:05):
They in that terms unintended asceleration and phantom breaking. That's
when your car stops without you wanting it to, and
that happened in tunnels, even in tunnels, I mean imagining
your car stops in a tunnel. And so we were
checking all what Elon Musquez said about the autopilot, and
for the longest time he has promised or not not
(06:27):
just from announced basically to the world how secure the autopilot,
but that it was ninety percent better than any human driver,
and that autonomous driving was a solved problem that goes
back as far as twenty sixteen. And here we have
all these complaints of customers. So obviously there was a
big gap between words and reality.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So clearly they did know that they had a problem.
So how did they address that.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
They told the customers that it was their mistake. There
was actual actual commands so to speak, not to put
anything and writing. We have that we have that bit
of information or communication where where it says, let's not
put anything in writing here, do not speak on the
(07:18):
on the voice boxes, mailboxes of anybody, don't leave voice messages,
don't send any letters, no emails. At one point there
was a guy who wanted to kind of gather all
the information about these autopilot's problems together, and he was
told no, with the with the explanation that Tesla did
(07:43):
not want to be open, so to speak, to subpoenas
if if authorities would come in and subpoena them, they
would find all the information. Then they didn't didn't want that,
so it would be better not to if at all,
if they needed they it would be spread all around
the company, but not in one place. So yeah, that's
(08:03):
that was very perplexing.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So would you say, from what you learned when you
look at the way the autopilot developed over a series
of cars and things, could you say that really they
were developing it as they went, that maybe the expectation
that was sold to a customer wasn't quite what they
were actually providing.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Actually, that that was what became clear to us. Elon
Musk he is a Silicon Valley guy, and that is
the Silicon value approach. You know, when you put out
a game or some kind of other software, when you're
almost done in that world, you sent out the software
(08:49):
to the customers and they will complete it for you.
They will find all the errors and then report back
to you, and that way you get a better version
and then another better version. I mean, if you depending
on how old your listeners are, if they remember Windows
three point zero or three point one or so, those
were very glitchy software, but they were sent out by
(09:13):
millions and then over time all the glitches were taken out.
And Tesla has taken that approach and applied it to
vehicles that weigh a ton two tons and travel at
you know, one hundred kilometers or faster per hour on
the roads, and it just seems awkward that we're all
(09:33):
in this kind of testing area of his, that he's
turned all the roads into this lab. But he says, well,
that's the fastest way to learn, and it's really important
that we do this as fast as possible, So he's
fine with it.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
A lot has of course, taking place in the last
sort of year or so, and the book finishes just
as President Trump is elected. Do you think that Alan
saw himself as a shadow president?
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Well, definitely. He explicitly said, I'm going into politics to
stop all these silly investigations or maybe not silly, but
stupid investigations. In his mind, he knew full well that
all the investigations, like I just laid out that the
SEC actually was investigating, is he is what he's doing there?
(10:20):
Is that being very hopeful or optimistic or is that actual?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
You know?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Of course stock manipulation, market manipulation. Uh. There were investigations
into the autopilot software, investigations about free speech and hate speech,
not not getting hate speech in X and all that,
and he explicitly I don't want that to stop, and
(10:46):
so I'm going to get a guy into the White
House that is going to owe me.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Do you think that Elon Musk is actually cut out
for politics?
Speaker 3 (10:57):
It's not really him for the last I mean the
last nine months. I guess you could say a totally
ordinary for him. It's not He always said he didn't
want politics. That's not for him. And it's such a
long game, a complicated game. And he's the tech guy.
He wants to take humanity to Mars. He has much
(11:18):
higher goals, and I didn't. It seems that he didn't
expect Trump to be that just you know, taking his
money and then cutting the text benefits for his electric vehicles.
That apparently he didn't expect that, and that he's founded
this or is trying to find to come up with
(11:40):
this Third American Party. It seems to me a little
bit out of spite, maybe out of the moment, the
anger of the moment. Afterwards, he's already given him more
money now Trump that it doesn't I mean, Musk has
given Trump additional money. Why would you do that if
you have your own party too. He has to get
into the good graces of Trump again, because otherwise, you know,
(12:03):
Tesla has actually lost money in the first quarter they
were in the red with the car business. They were
only profitable because they were selling the CO two emissions.
And if that's that's going away, it doesn't look very
good for his company, and it's it's it's very costly
to run that bigger company.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Why are we so intrigued by mask.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Well, I don't know. I want to stress I'm not
against trust in anyway. I'm not putting him down. I'm
not saying, you know, he's a fraud. And some people
say that. Obviously he's a very intelligent guy. I mean,
who else has created a car company in the Western
world at least in the last what five six decades?
And not only has he done that, he's created the
(12:50):
most valuable car company in the world, and he's sold
more electric vehicles than anybody else. I mean, I'm from
Germany and we have to admit that the very old,
traditional and maybe arrogant car industry and our c did
not do what he was able to do as an outsider.
(13:11):
And also what he's accomplished with space X that if
NASA wants to get back the astronauts from the space station,
they actually have to call him. So obviously the guy
is really, really smart and I'm a great businessman. At
the same time, he's got all these flaws, so it's
(13:33):
it's really hard to see what will happen next. We'll
just watch and as a report, I mean, we're not done.
We've written this book and detailed all in this book,
but we're continuing to report what's happening in the newspaper
and maybe there will be another book soon.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Oh, it's lovely to talk to you, and thank you
very much for the book, very very much enjoyed it.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Thank you. That's nice to hear.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
And that was investigative journalist Sunka iverson. The book we
discussed is called The Tesla Files and it is in
stalls now.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks at B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks atb.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
First Up, This'sal we take a look at an expose
on the inside workings of Elon Musks Tesla. Back in
twenty twenty two, investigative reporter Sunka Ivison received one hundred
gigabytes of confidential leaked data from a whistleblower inside Tesla.
The files detailed dangerous autopilot's software errors, a high number
of workplace accidents in Tesla's factories, and a culture of
(00:34):
fear within the company. Sonka's investigation is now a book
called The Tesla Files or Whistleblower, A Leak and a
Fight for Truth, The inside story of Musk's Empire. Sonka
Iverson joins me, now, good morning, Thank you so much
for being with us.
Speaker 3 (00:49):
Sure, good morning to you too.
Speaker 2 (00:51):
Tell me what were your first thoughts when a colleague
called you and said he'd received a call from a
confidential informer who claimed to have information about serious issues
at Tesla.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
Well, I thought it would be nice, but it sounded
too good to be true because he also said that
information was just lying around there and inside Tesla. I
couldn't believe it. But of course, if somebody tells you
he's working at there's a possibility to talk to somebody
at working at Tesla, you have to take it. Because
at the time Tesla was a complete black box and
(01:26):
nobody inside Tesla talked to anybody outside, and so a
great stroke of luck.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
So in a situation like this, how do journal let's
go about checking the integrity of the informer and the
data that you're being offered.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Well, it's a long process. It's At first, he didn't
want to be The problem was he didn't want to
be named. He didn't want to give me his name,
didn't want me to know who he was, exactly where
he was, all those things. But he kept sending data,
I mean one file and another file, not the twenty
(02:03):
three thousand files that we actually came to possess after
a few weeks. But it was so tantalizing the information.
And at the same time I talked to my boss,
I talked to our lawyers, and they said, well, you
have to make sure that this is really You have
to get over there and see him actually pull it
out of the system, because that's what he claimed that
anybody at Tesla could access this top secret information with
(02:28):
no security at all, so we did so. I after
after a couple of weeks, I finally convinced them and
he gave me, so to speak, a display, a performance.
He actually accessed the information in front of me, and
it seemed all true that he could access the information
(02:48):
if you type. He typed in the words Elon Musk,
and hundreds of files came out and I saw the
while the bills of Elon Musk, bodyguards and anything I
asked him to type in it all there was a
receiption reception, and yeah, the then next day we copied
the first nineteen gearbytes or so, and then we started
(03:11):
verifying goals.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
So I imagine the thing that struck you first was
the fact that you could actually access or that an
employee could actually access all this information before you even
got to kind of working out what was in the information.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yes, yes, that was the actual first implausibility, because I mean,
Tesla was the most valuable car company in the world,
by far, more valuable than Volkswagen and Mercedes and BMW
and all those together. And Tesla or Masque specifically was
so paranoid. He always said everybody else is out to
(03:49):
get him, the oil industry, the diesel car industry, the politicians,
the media. That's why everybody inside Tesla was told you
must never talk to anybody outside. And when you start
working at Tesla, or started at that time, even when
you had your first into you before you before you
had your first interview, you would have to sign an NDA.
(04:11):
So the level of secrecy was completely, you know, out
out of this world. And then to have that peril
to anybody can access any information at all, that didn't
just didn't make sense.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Did you get to the bottom of why a take
billionaire was so relaxed with privacy, seeming to have little
protection in place for such highly sensitive information.
Speaker 3 (04:36):
No, it's we never found out how, I mean, why
they wouldn't talk to us. They still haven't answered a
single of our questions. It's just perplexing. And later when
when when when we started, when you know, we went
through looking all of the twenty three thousand, I mean,
(04:58):
imagine how how long that takes. Twenty three thousand documents,
and we had to get each and every one of
them because we couldn't be sure what we were missing.
We were afraid to miss anything. So but then we
found actually that there had been warnings inside Tesla about
this mistake, this completely unsecure the level of insecurity, and
(05:23):
later the actually the guy who had warned about it
was laid a fire for it. So it's just a
very situation that didn't make any sense at all.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
What else did you find in the files that really
caught your attention?
Speaker 3 (05:39):
Yes, once we got over the circle that why do
we even have the information? We saw what really impressed
us or just our brains went wow, how can this be?
Was all the information about the autopilot, because there were
thousands upon thousands of complaints of customers about their cars
accelerating by themselves, breaking by themselves. That's called unintended acceleration.
(06:05):
They in that terms unintended asceleration and phantom breaking. That's
when your car stops without you wanting it to, and
that happened in tunnels, even in tunnels, I mean imagining
your car stops in a tunnel. And so we were
checking all what Elon Musquez said about the autopilot, and
for the longest time he has promised or not not
(06:27):
just from announced basically to the world how secure the autopilot,
but that it was ninety percent better than any human driver,
and that autonomous driving was a solved problem that goes
back as far as twenty sixteen. And here we have
all these complaints of customers. So obviously there was a
big gap between words and reality.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
So clearly they did know that they had a problem.
So how did they address that.
Speaker 3 (06:56):
They told the customers that it was their mistake. There
was actual actual commands so to speak, not to put
anything and writing. We have that we have that bit
of information or communication where where it says, let's not
put anything in writing here, do not speak on the
(07:18):
on the voice boxes, mailboxes of anybody, don't leave voice messages,
don't send any letters, no emails. At one point there
was a guy who wanted to kind of gather all
the information about these autopilot's problems together, and he was
told no, with the with the explanation that Tesla did
(07:43):
not want to be open, so to speak, to subpoenas
if if authorities would come in and subpoena them, they
would find all the information. Then they didn't didn't want that,
so it would be better not to if at all,
if they needed they it would be spread all around
the company, but not in one place. So yeah, that's
(08:03):
that was very perplexing.
Speaker 2 (08:06):
So would you say, from what you learned when you
look at the way the autopilot developed over a series
of cars and things, could you say that really they
were developing it as they went, that maybe the expectation
that was sold to a customer wasn't quite what they
were actually providing.
Speaker 3 (08:28):
Actually, that that was what became clear to us. Elon
Musk he is a Silicon Valley guy, and that is
the Silicon value approach. You know, when you put out
a game or some kind of other software, when you're
almost done in that world, you sent out the software
(08:49):
to the customers and they will complete it for you.
They will find all the errors and then report back
to you, and that way you get a better version
and then another better version. I mean, if you depending
on how old your listeners are, if they remember Windows
three point zero or three point one or so, those
were very glitchy software, but they were sent out by
(09:13):
millions and then over time all the glitches were taken out.
And Tesla has taken that approach and applied it to
vehicles that weigh a ton two tons and travel at
you know, one hundred kilometers or faster per hour on
the roads, and it just seems awkward that we're all
(09:33):
in this kind of testing area of his, that he's
turned all the roads into this lab. But he says, well,
that's the fastest way to learn, and it's really important
that we do this as fast as possible, So he's
fine with it.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
A lot has of course, taking place in the last
sort of year or so, and the book finishes just
as President Trump is elected. Do you think that Alan
saw himself as a shadow president?
Speaker 3 (10:00):
Well, definitely. He explicitly said, I'm going into politics to
stop all these silly investigations or maybe not silly, but
stupid investigations. In his mind, he knew full well that
all the investigations, like I just laid out that the
SEC actually was investigating, is he is what he's doing there?
(10:20):
Is that being very hopeful or optimistic or is that actual?
Speaker 2 (10:25):
You know?
Speaker 3 (10:26):
Of course stock manipulation, market manipulation. Uh. There were investigations
into the autopilot software, investigations about free speech and hate speech,
not not getting hate speech in X and all that,
and he explicitly I don't want that to stop, and
(10:46):
so I'm going to get a guy into the White
House that is going to owe me.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
Do you think that Elon Musk is actually cut out
for politics?
Speaker 3 (10:57):
It's not really him for the last I mean the
last nine months. I guess you could say a totally
ordinary for him. It's not He always said he didn't
want politics. That's not for him. And it's such a
long game, a complicated game. And he's the tech guy.
He wants to take humanity to Mars. He has much
(11:18):
higher goals, and I didn't. It seems that he didn't
expect Trump to be that just you know, taking his
money and then cutting the text benefits for his electric vehicles.
That apparently he didn't expect that, and that he's founded
this or is trying to find to come up with
(11:40):
this Third American Party. It seems to me a little
bit out of spite, maybe out of the moment, the
anger of the moment. Afterwards, he's already given him more
money now Trump that it doesn't I mean, Musk has
given Trump additional money. Why would you do that if
you have your own party too. He has to get
into the good graces of Trump again, because otherwise, you know,
(12:03):
Tesla has actually lost money in the first quarter they
were in the red with the car business. They were
only profitable because they were selling the CO two emissions.
And if that's that's going away, it doesn't look very
good for his company, and it's it's it's very costly
to run that bigger company.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
Why are we so intrigued by mask.
Speaker 3 (12:28):
Well, I don't know. I want to stress I'm not
against trust in anyway. I'm not putting him down. I'm
not saying, you know, he's a fraud. And some people
say that. Obviously he's a very intelligent guy. I mean,
who else has created a car company in the Western
world at least in the last what five six decades?
And not only has he done that, he's created the
(12:50):
most valuable car company in the world, and he's sold
more electric vehicles than anybody else. I mean, I'm from
Germany and we have to admit that the very old,
traditional and maybe arrogant car industry and our c did
not do what he was able to do as an outsider.
(13:11):
And also what he's accomplished with space X that if
NASA wants to get back the astronauts from the space station,
they actually have to call him. So obviously the guy
is really, really smart and I'm a great businessman. At
the same time, he's got all these flaws, so it's
(13:33):
it's really hard to see what will happen next. We'll
just watch and as a report, I mean, we're not done.
We've written this book and detailed all in this book,
but we're continuing to report what's happening in the newspaper
and maybe there will be another book soon.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Oh, it's lovely to talk to you, and thank you
very much for the book, very very much enjoyed it.
Speaker 3 (13:58):
Thank you. That's nice to hear.
Speaker 2 (13:59):
And that was investigative journalist Sunka iverson. The book we
discussed is called The Tesla Files and it is in
stalls now.
Speaker 1 (14:06):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks at B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio.
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