The very first time I decided to actually look into whether Tesla was doing what it said it was doing, I spent a long weekend discovering that its revolutionary battery swap station was a sham designed to rip off California’s Zero Emission Vehicle program. That one encounter at a truck stop in the middle of the Central Valley introduced me to the toxic core of Tesla’s profoundly cynical culture: a sham technology propping up a fake environmental mission, ripping off public subsidies in order to appear more economically viable than it was. It was a jarring glimpse of an embryonic monster that, after nearly a decade of metastasizing growth, now looms over our political and economic system.

But as shocking as my first view of Tesla’s heart of darkness was for me, the bigger surprise came when I reached out to the California Air Resources Board to inform them of my findings and get their perspective on what seemed to me to be a blatant fraud. As it turned out, CARB staff had already grown concerned that Tesla was gaming the credit system and had recommended the loophole it was exploiting be closed. Instead, the board chose a fig-leaf tweak to the policy that staff said failed to adequately address their concerns, and effectively allowed Tesla to continue raking in ill-gotten credits from their fake swap system until the loophole they were exploiting sundowned.

Though the staff and stakeholders I spoke to had no problem seeing that Tesla was making a mockery of their policy’s stated goal of bringing real technologies to market, they downplayed Tesla’s fraud as (effectively) a cost of doing business. Yeah it’s a problem, was the vibe, but we can’t let that distract from all the good the ZEV program (and by extension, Tesla, its greatest beneficiary) is doing.

Over the nearly decade that followed, in scandal after scandal, regulators have effectively said the same thing. Multiple NHTSA administrators have described “holding back innovation” as the worst possible outcome, and failed to act even as their colleagues at NTSB proved Autopilot was contributing to novel forms of fatal car crashes. The SEC has flailed in the face of Musk’s blatant stock manipulation on Twitter, obviously cowed by Musk’s facile blustering about “free speech.” Again and again, in area after area, society’s guardians have chosen to excuse (or simply go easy on) crime after crime.

But nowhere is the sheer impunity that has turned Musk from a garden variety Silicon Valley asshole into a runaway ego of Trumpian proportions so obvious as in the one area where Tesla should set a positive example: the environment. Tesla’s cynicism about its ostensible environmental mission was obvious from that first investigation, when I found them using diesel-powered Superchargers while claiming carbon reductions that assumed every electron that goes into every Tesla is zero emission. But I never could have predicted the sheer scope of Tesla’s systemic disregard for the environment, and the laws that are supposed to protect it… let alone the regulatory malpractice that has enabled it.

In 2019, shortly after the publication of Ludicrous (please buy a copy if you haven’t, it’s the best way to support my work!), I discovered through public documents posted online that the paint shop at Tesla’s Fremont factory had received 18 notices of violation of the Clean Air Act from the local regulator. As I dug into the situation, I found what I seemed to always find behind the scenes at Tesla: a mix of absolute chaos, and a total indifference to the law.

When pollution control equipment failed, Tesla simply continued making cars without permitted controls in place, fouling its own sprinkler systems with overspray even as fires raged at the facility. Not only did Tesla alter its paint shop without permits, it failed to keep proper paperwork so the extent of its pollution was impossible to quantify. Most galling of all, it flaunted its noncompliance, posting video from the paint shop that revealed its hacked-together, non-compliant filter system to anyone who knew what to look for.

Tesla issued its usual non-denial in response to my reporting, failing to refute any of the substance while indulging in a deeply unconvincing round of historical whataboutism. By this point the local regulator had confirmed that it was negotiating a settlement with Tesla over the violations, and so I waited for news of that settlement to break.

By the time the local regulator announced that settlement in May of 2021, Tesla had racked up 18 more Clean Air Act violations, suggesting that even in the midst of negotiations with the regulator Tesla couldn’t stop violating emissions control laws. When the settlement came [PDF], it was easy to see why: resolving 33 violations had cost Tesla just $1 million, most of which came in the form of a battery system donated to the community. In its bitterly laughable conclusion, the settlement proclaimed:

“The settlement agreement also commits Tesla to implementing a comprehensive environmental management system, which will track all applicable environmental requirements and ensure that the company’s managers are trained on what is needed to comply with them. This environmental management system is designed to ensure that Tesla remains in full compliance going forward. Tesla has already begun implementing such a system, but today’s settlement agreement will make this a legally binding and enforceable commitment.”

That settlement was announced on May 7, 2021. Two weeks later, Tesla had already received another notice of violation of the Clean Air Act. By the end of 2021 it had racked up 12 new violations, and over the course of 2022 it racked up another 28, barely breaking stride for a $275,000 federal settlement that similarly touted EPA’s “compliance monitoring” as having “returned [Tesla] to compliance.” Over the course of 2023, Tesla received a whopping 76 notices of violation of the Clean Air Act.

But Tesla’s absolute impunity when it comes to the Clean Air Act, and the pathetic farce of regulation that enables it, is just one offensive in the company’s Marine Corps-like environmental assault on the country’s air, land and water. I stumbled on the water pollution side quite by accident (content warning: link to X, The Everything App), when I checked Tesla’s Fremont factory EPA ECHO page to find out how many new violations there had been since my last check, and found that they were now out of compliance with the hazardous waste handling law known as RCRA. A look at California’s EnviroSTOR database showed that concentrations of a pollutant and class 2A carcinogen called PCE had jumped at one monitoring well, from around the legal limit of 5 micrograms per liter in 2014 when Tesla had taken over the factory to 33.5 micrograms per liter in 2022.

Yesterday I checked EnviroSTOR again, and it turns out [PDF] that in October of 2023 Tesla signed an agreement with the EPA confirming that groundwater under the factory was massively polluted, and that it could no longer keep polluted water from moving beyond the factory property. The maximum concentrations of dangerous pollutants reported are absolutely eye-popping: 7.6 mg of gasoline, 4.5 mg of diesel, and nearly 13 mg of motor oil were reported per liter of water, the legal limit for all of which is 100 micrograms per liter. Maximum concentrations of Benzene, Ethylbenzene, TCE, PCE, Arsenic, and 1,4 dioxane were all massively beyond the legal limits. As far as I’m aware, nobody has reported seriously on Tesla’s groundwater pollution issue at the Fremont factory, and no regulator has made any effort to inform the public about the situation, beyond posting a few documents to obscure databases.

Just this week we also learned that Tesla’s systemic pollution of the air and water around its Fremont factory is only the tip of the iceberg, when 25 California counties sued the automaker for mislabeling and illegally dumping hazardous waste at 101 sites across the state over five years. But despite the fact that such “intentional and negligent” dumping is supposed to carry massive fines for each incident at each site and for each day a violation goes unreported and unremediated, the counties settled a day later for a pathetic $1.5 million. $200,000 of that covered the cost of a six-year investigation that found Tesla systemically ignored hazardous waste handling, reporting and disposal laws, not just at its factory but at its retail stores and other facilities as well.

What’s so jarring about all this is not simply the laughable insignificance of the fines in all of these cases, but the fact that every single data point we have points to the same picture: Tesla is a routine, systemic polluter that ignores environmental laws across every aspect of its business. Of course, these are two sides of the same coin: because Tesla knows the cost of violations is so low, it makes effectively no effort to meaningfully comply with any environmental law. If you’ve ever wondered how Tesla makes money on EVs when nobody else can, the fact that it has a free pass to violate every environmental law on the books while receiving unprecedented subsidies for its ostensibly positive environmental impact should clear up any confusion.

For a decade now, America has waved off a parade of unethical and illegal behavior on Tesla’s part as something we just have to tolerate to usher in the electric car future, an unfortunate cost of making the world a better place. But the more we’ve excused the more Tesla has taken license to ignore the law, the company’s legal compliance following the spiraling ego trip of its Chief Executive Officer. The monster turning Twitter into a Nazi CSAM hellscape, like his monstrous car company that is wantonly polluting the state that did so much to help birth it, are the products of our collective choices. Sure, both probably had a kernel of monstrousness in them from the very beginning, but both had to be nurtured with constant, repeated assurances that whatever they do is for the greater good, no matter what.

At the end of the day, this is the one thing scarier than Elon Musk: the fact that we all wanted so badly to believe his empty promises that we let him run amok, and allowed him to become something that even he clearly doesn’t actually control anymore. Musk and Tesla are one man and one company, and in theory could be brought into line with enough political will, but they exist in their current monstrous states precisely because we can no longer summon the political will to do anything hard. Musk is the ugly reflection of our collective ineptitude, apathy and stupidity, and as long as he goes unpunished he will continue to pollute our physical and mental environment in ever more grotesque ways.