Elon Musk seemed to make an example out of a former employee suspected of leaking confidential information by concocting a rather crafty way to catch them.
Elon Musk might be the most chatty billionaire on the planet.
The man is regularly interacting with fans and foes on Twitter and revealing previously unknown stories.
In fact Musk is often all too happy to let loose stories about what goes on at one of his many companies.
The entrepreneur regularly posts updates and successes for the world to see, but there are obviously some details he wants to keep secret, and one former Tesla employee was preventing him from doing that.
The leaker was sharing secrets with a news outlet. (Apu Gomes/Getty Images)(Chesnot/Getty Images)
Back in 2008, five years after Tesla was founded, there was a person who was allegedly leaking confidential information.
As you can imagine, this would be frustrating for any company so Musk came up with a pretty smart way to catch the person out.
One curious Twitter user asked Musk for more information about the leak in a post on Twitter back in 2022, when he tagged the founder and wrote: “Elon in 2008 how did you catch that employee who leaked the confidential data of Tesla and sold it to the news outlet?”
Musk responded to describe it as an ‘interesting story’, before revealing the genius method his team used to figure out who was responsible for sharing the information.
He explained: “We sent what appeared to be identical emails to all, but each was actually coded with either one or two spaces between sentences, forming a binary signature that identified the leaker.”
By identifying the same signature in the information that had been leaked, Musk was able to track down the person responsible.
Elon Musk said he came up with the idea himself. (X/@elonmusk)
Users praised the plot as ‘smart’, with one person asking Musk who’d come up with it.
Musk responded to say the method was all his, though it does fall into a category known as a ‘canary trap’.
This method involves creating multiple versions of a sensitive document and giving them to different suspects, making it easier to spot which version gets leaked.
Once the case was solved, the person responsible for leaking the confidential information was, understandably, let go from Tesla.
Or, as Musk put it, they were ‘invited to further their career elsewhere’.
However, Musk decided against taking legal action against the person responsible.
Explaining his decision, Musk said he was simply ‘too busy trying to survive at the time’.
Musk might be on more solid ground now when it comes to his ‘survival’, but his ability to catch his leaker last time will hopefully prevent any of his employees from trying to outsmart him again in the future.
