Elon Musk says he's a friend of the environment. But Tesla's factories are racking up pollution violations
Tesla’s (TSLA) pollution issues have reportedly gone unaddressed at its Texas headquarters, adding another link in Elon Musk’s lengthy chain of environmental problems caused by his companies’ factories.
The Wall Street Journal, citing emails between Tesla officials and Texas regulators, documents, and interviews with former employees, reports that environmental issues have plagued the Austin gigafactory since it began operating in 2022.
Hazardous wastewater from production flowed — untreated — to Austin’s sewer system, while the plant’s casting furnace designed to melt metal for the Model Y’s parts couldn’t be properly closed. That left toxins to be spewed unhindered into the air and raised temperatures to as high as 100 degrees for shop floor workers.
While Tesla was hosting a party — complete with thousands of drunk Tesla fans, cowboys gyrating in cages, and a Harrison Ford cameo — in April 2022 to show off its new factory, workers were worried about a pond Tesla had built to hold wastewater from chemical spills, its paint shop, and construction, the Journal reports. Not only was the pond filled with toxins and smelled of rotten eggs, but a dead deer had been found in it.
For a while, water from that pond had been discharged into Austin’s sewer system without permission from local regulators. Some of Tesla’s attempts to remove waste turned nearly a mile of the Colorado River into a “mucky brown slick,” the Journal reports.
According to the Journal, Tesla leaders were aware of the sprawling factory’s problems but opted for short-term solutions. Former employees said managers would ignore workers’ concerns about environmental issues and that they were afraid they could lose their jobs for slowing down production.
“Tesla repeatedly asked me to lie to the government so that they could operate without paying for proper environmental controls,” an Austin environmental-compliance worker said in a 2024 memo to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Journal reports. The agency’s criminal enforcement division and a Texas state commission opened a preliminary inquiry related to those allegations.
Besides Tesla’s newly reported issues in Austin, the company’s Fremont, California, factory has been cited for more than 180 air quality violations since 2019. Seventy-five violation notices from local authorities have come since May, the Journal reports.
In August, local Texas authorities said in a violation notice that Musk’s SpaceX had repeatedly released pollutants into bodies of water near its Starbase factory in Boca Chica. A local nonprofit in Tennessee, where Musk’s xAI has landed its supercomputer, has raised concerns over its effect on the environment.
Despite the various issues with his companies, Musk has named himself the biggest champion of the environment on the planet.
“Tesla has done more to help the environment than all other companies combined,” he said last year. “It would be fair to say, therefore, as the leader of the company, I’ve done more for the environment than any single human on Earth.”
Musk has repeatedly slammed environmental regulations — and all regulations more broadly — as a hindrance to innovation, specifically his companies’ work.
In September, Musk said he would sue the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for “overreach” over new fines levied against SpaceX and complained that the agency was holding it back. He recently slammed other rules governing his Boring Company and SpaceX.
Thanks to his close relationship with President-elect Donald Trump, Musk has now been put in charge of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which aims to chop “at least $2 trillion” from the federal budget. Although much is unclear about the execution of that goal, Musk has said he wants to slash regulations and the federal workforce broadly.
That could affect the EPA and other agencies that regulate Musk’s companies, such as the FAA and the Food and Drug Administration, which regulate SpaceX and Neurlink, as well as the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration.
“Not only are fewer employees required to enforce fewer regulations, but the agency would produce fewer regulations once its scope of authority is properly limited,” Musk and co-DOGE leader Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in an editorial last week, noting that Trump will slash “thousands” of regulations.
