In the past, I have sent Cristina Balan money to help her fight Musk and Tesla. She’s currently fighting Cancer, yet she hasn’t missed a single date with Tesla lawyers making her suffer through “arbitration.” She is tenacious and charming. I love her attitude:
Tesla Tries to Bury Case Against Cristina Balan, Gives Her Another Chance to Fight
There’s a Romanian engineer in Tesla’s history. Cristina Balan was once called a CAD Fairy for solving really hard engineering issues. She even got her initials on the first Model S battery packs for that. What could be a beautiful story turned into a nasty one after Tesla publicly accused her of wrongdoings. The latest chapter may prove to be beneficial to the engineer. To fully understand what is going on, you’ll have to learn the entire story.
Cristina Balan started working for Tesla in 2010. Her task was to design the Model S battery pack. When she successfully did that, Balan was praised multiple times for her creative thinking and hard work. That all ended when she had to join the interior fittings team. There, the engineer discovered issues with the floor mats and suspected relations with suppliers.
By coincidence, Elon Musk fired a now-famous email message by the same time. It told all employees they should get in touch directly with him if they found anything fishy in the company. Balan believed that and sent Musk a message to share her concerns. It was April 2014.
Instead of meeting the Tesla CEO, Balan was taken into a room. She said that she was forced to resign due to the things she wanted to let Musk know about the company. Apparently, he already knew about them and did not want to change anything. To get her to resign, Tesla would have threatened to deport her teammates with pending green card requests. After that, Balan filed an arbitration against Tesla.