Tesla ‘hids’ extra spaces in emails to employees to detect leaks

Tesla “hids” extra spaces in an email to track down a person inside Tesla who might be leaking information. The idea, he says, came from CEO Elon Musk, who had already taken office in 2008. The number of spaces in the mail could be used to identify the source.

The employee is said to have been caught in 2008 selling internal information to the media in this way, according to Musk on Twitter. “We sent [werknemers] apparently identical emails, but they were actually encoded with one or two spaces between sentences, creating a binary system that could identify the leaker.”

According to the CEO of Tesla, the employee in question was fired thanks to the trick with the binary emails. A follower of Musk then asks him if the perpetrator was being prosecuted, to which he replies: “We were too busy surviving at the time.” Musk is referring to Tesla, which had a very difficult time during the global recession.