Tesla Inc on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Martin Tripp, a former employee of the company on claims of hacking trade secrets and transferring large amounts of data to third parties.

In the lawsuit which was filed in federal court in Nevada, Tesla claimed that Tripp, who previously worked at the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada admitted to writing software that hacked the electric carmaker’s manufacturing operating system.

The former employee also admitted to transferring several gigabytes of company data to third parties and giving false claims to the media.

Martin Tripp was not immediately available for comment.

According to the lawsuit, he operated his hacking software on three separate computer systems of other individuals at Tesla so that even after he left the company, data would be exported and falsely implicating the individuals.

“Within a few months of Tripp joining Tesla, his managers identified Tripp as having problems with job performance and at times being disruptive and combative with his colleagues,” the lawsuit said.

“As a result of these and other issues, on May 17, 2018, Tripp was assigned to a new role. Tripp expressed anger that he was reassigned.”

In an email to staff earlier this week, Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla Inc, wrote that an unnamed employee at Tesla had carried out “extensive and damaging sabotage” to the company’s operations.

The employee, Musk said, purportedly made unspecified code changes to the company’s manufacturing operating system and sent sensitive Tesla data to unnamed third parties.

Report by: Clara Doku