Elon Musk made big promises to Wall Street about Tesla’s Model Y SUV in 2022, and the company was ramping up its production in Austin, Texas, when environmental problems threatened to derail his plans. The door to the plant’s giant casting furnace, which melts metal to be molded into the Model Y’s parts, wouldn’t shut, spewing toxins into the air and raising temperatures for workers on the floor to as high as 100 degrees. Hazardous wastewater from production—containing paint, oil and other chemicals—was also flowing untreated into the city’s sewer, in violation of state guidelines. Tesla left the costly problems largely unaddressed during the critical ramp-up. As a result, the company’s 10 million-plus square foot plant—among the largest car factories in the world—dumped toxic pollutants into the environment near Austin for months.

This account of the Austin plant’s environmental problems, which haven’t been reported previously, comes from emails between Texas regulators and the company obtained by The Wall Street Journal in response to public-records requests, as well as interviews with former employees and other documents, including a memo sent by a whistleblower to the Environmental Protection Agency….Former employees said they feared they might lose their job if they drew attention internally to potential environmental hazards, because senior managers didn’t consider such issues to be mission critical. As head of the company, Musk set the tone, these people said, pushing employees to move fast and complaining frequently in public statements that unnecessary regulations are strangling the U.S.

Musk is considered a champion of the environment for his role in pioneering the electric car industry. He has said the mission of Tesla, which is the largest maker of electric cars in the U.S., is to “protect life on Earth.” Yet across his business empire, Musk’s companies show a pattern of breaking environmental rules again and again, federal and state government filings and documents show.

Tesla’s Fremont, Calif., facility has accumulated more warnings for violations of air pollution rules over the past five years than almost any other company’s plant in California, according to a Journal analysis of informal enforcement actions in the EPA’s compliance database. It is second only to a refinery owned by oil-and-gas behemoth Chevron, which is in nearby Richmond.

In 2024, California regulators said Tesla violated air-pollution permits at its Fremont factory 112 times over the past five years and alleged it repeatedly failed to fix equipment designed to reduce emissions, releasing thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals in excess of permissible limits into the surrounding communities. “

Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has also had run-ins with regulators in Texas and community pushback in Florida, including over the impact of its launches on local plants and animals. Federal regulators recently fined the company for dumping about 262,000 gallons of wastewater from launches into wetlands in Texas without a permit. SpaceX has denied the allegations. 

Excerpt from Susan Pulliam and Emily Glazer,  Musk Says He Wants to Save the Planet. Tesla’s Factories Are Making It Dirtier, WSJ, Nov. 25, 2024