A former Tesla engineer turned whistleblower who was fired back in 2014 says she and her entire team were threatened with deportation after bringing up brake safety concerns directly to CEO Elon Musk. Cristina Balan, a Romanian-born engineer, was recently successful in throwing out Tesla’s arbitration case against her. Her goal is to see Tesla in an open courtroom in an effort to influence corporate policy across the country, the BBC reports.
Balan was heavily involved with the Model S, so much so that her initials actually appear on the sedan’s battery pack, according to Electrek. In 2014, she went directly to Muck about safety concerns — saying that the Model S’ floor mats could cause some sort of brake safety issue if the accelerator pedal were to get stuck under the mat (à la Toyota’s unintended acceleration issue). She claimed Musk chose the supplier based on friendship and not quality.
I WON 🙌 I WON THE APEAL AGAINST ELON MUSK AND TESLA !!!!
FIRST APEAL MUSK AND TESLA LOST!
I AM GRATEFUL FOR MY AMAZING FRIEND AND LAWYER WILLIAM MORAN @BillAlwaysWins who believed in me
First ex Tesla immigrant Woman Engineer Who fight Musk as a Pro Se!
A lot of Firsts! pic.twitter.com/DEkpVN9wKU
— Cristina Balan – STOP Forced Arbitration (@CristinaIBalan) April 14, 2025
Musk’s alleged bait and switch
In March of 2013, Musk sent out an email to the entirety of Tesla regarding an open-door policy for bringing up product issues, saying, “You can talk to your manager’s manager without his permission, you can talk directly to a VP in another dept, you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone without anyone else’s permission.” It made Balan think she was safe to speak to Musk about the floor mat issue. However, when she showed up for her scheduled meeting with Musk, she was instead greeted by lawyers and “large men in uniforms.” They forced her to resign from her position.
Here’s what was said during that meeting as well as some of the fallout after it, according to Electrek:
During that meeting, Balan says that Tesla’s lawyer threatened to deport many members of her team, who were currently waiting on green card applications, if she didn’t sign the resignation, seemingly in response to her team backing her up in raising these concerns. She ended up signing the resignation in protest, writing on it that “I’m resigning for the position that I was put in a month ago bc I dare to speak up to the Sr management, also bc people that had the chance to speak up were threatened…”
When Balan’s case got coverage in Huffington Post in 2017, Tesla sent a statement that Balan had stolen company resources to work on a “secret” personal project (Tesla emails show that Balan was told to work on this project by leadership). After this, Balan says she faced difficulty in finding work as companies feared ending up on Musk’s blacklist.
A day in court
She filed a defamation lawsuit over the statement, but Tesla forced her case into arbitration and was able to get the defamation suit thrown out. She appealed the decision and after many delays — including her fight against stage-3B cancer, which is now in remission — she succeeded in getting the arbitration case thrown out while representing herself, according to BBC News.
“I want to clear my name,” she told BBC News. “I wish Elon Musk had the decency to apologize.”
