A day after Lukasz Krupski put out a fire at a Tesla car delivery location in Norway, seriously burning his hands and preventing a disaster, he got an email from Elon Musk. “Congratulations for saving the day!” Mr. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, wrote in March 2019. But what started as a story about a heroic employee and a grateful employer has devolved into an epic battle between the carmaker and Mr. Krupski, a service technician. After initially being hailed as a savior, Mr. Krupski said in an interview with The New York Times, he was harassed, threatened and eventually fired after complaining about what he considered grave safety problems at his workplace near Oslo. Mr. Krupski, originally from Poland, was part of a crew that helped prepare Teslas for buyers but became so frustrated with the company that last year he handed over reams of data from the carmaker’s computer system to Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper. The data contained lists of Tesla employees, including Mr. Musk, often with their Social Security numbers and other personal information. There were thousands of accident reports and other internal Tesla communications that Handelsblatt used as the basis for stories about flaws with the company’s Autopilot driver-assistance software. The data also provided the basis for stories by Handelsblatt and Wired magazine about how much trouble Tesla was having manufacturing the Cybertruck pick-up, which the company has said will be delivered to customers at the end of this month, almost three years behind schedule. (Some of the information came from a second, unidentified Tesla employee.) Mr. Krupski said he had gotten access to sensitive data simply by entering search terms in an internal company website, raising questions about how Tesla protected the privacy of thousands of employees and its own secrets. None of this could have been foreseen on March 30, 2019, when Mr. Krupski, who had been hired only a few months earlier, was part of a crew summoned on short notice to prepare Teslas for delivery to customers in Norway, where electric vehicles account for more than 80 percent of new car sales. Tesla, which sells cars directly to buyers, was using space in an exhibition hall near Oslo to deliver vehicles. Around noon, a charging device that another employee had improperly modified burst into flames beneath a Model 3 sedan. Mr. Krupski yanked the device away and, with his bare hands, pulled out wiring, pipes and other components that were burning and melting. He used rags and towels to suffocate the flames. “It is fair to say that if it wasn’t for his action, the result would have been a car on fire,” Mr. Krupski’s manager wrote in an email to Mr. Musk the next day. Mr. Krupski said the fire could have spread, endangering workers and customers waiting nearby and forcing evacuation of the motor show. The only person seriously injured was Mr. Krupski, who was hospitalized with severe burns but has recovered.ّ
