Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has allegedly been stiffing small businesses, causing some of them to file for bankruptcy.

According to an investigation by CNN, contractors have filed liens — claims of possession of property until a debt is paid off — for more than $110 million against Tesla over the last five years. The company still owes dozens of businesses more than $24 million.

Worst of all, many of these firms are mom-and-pop operations, making them extremely vulnerable when a contractor like Tesla simply doesn't pay up after they've already put their limited resources into a service.

The investigation highlights how Musk's firms are systematically taking advantage of their contractors — a pattern, strikingly, that's very similar to the longstanding business practices of US president and former Musk ally Donald Trump.

And it's not just Tesla — the billionaire's social media platform Twitter, since renamed X, also allegedly stopped paying rent on its offices in San Francisco, and failed to pay out annual bonuses. Its "extreme belt-tightening" required "nearly everyone to whom it owes money to sue," as attorney Ethan Jacobs wrote in a 2023 court filing.

Musk also oversaw brutal cost-cutting efforts as the unofficial head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in DC, pulling out the rug beneath entire agencies in a complete disregard for social norms and the fate of regular people.

It's become so common for Tesla not to pay up, even one of its lawyers admitted that Tesla takes "some time to pay," including legal bills, during a bankruptcy proceeding against the carmaker last year, as quoted by CNN.

Tesla's construction of its enormous Gigafactory in Austin, in particular, has left countless broken promises and small businesses in distress in its wake.

Many businesses CNN reached out to, which filed liens and lawsuits against Musk's companies, weren't willing to go on the record for fear of retaliation, pointing to his infamous wielding of non-disclosure contracts.

Some firms said they were still hoping to be paid. Others have already written off the losses.

Many of them pointed to the many ways Tesla tries to wriggle out of having to pay them through convoluted language in its contracts that often only lawyers can make sense of.

All of those broken contracts and unpaid labor have understandably left a sour taste in the mouths of many small-time contractors and businesspeople.

"[Musk's] goal is to run through everything now — he doesn’t care what or who that impacts — to save the future of the world," one entrepreneur told CNN. "Tesla was probably one of the only companies we did business with where it just felt like they absolutely did not care about putting a company out of business."

Musk's systematic unwillingness to pay the firms on which his empire is built has shocked legal experts.

Jacobs told CNN that he was shocked that Musk was brazen enough to have "a practice of not paying people until they sue."

"They were essentially saying that they just decided not to pay until they had to," he said, referring to former Twitter executives under Musk. "It’s not the way I have generally seen people doing business."

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