According to the trial, moments after the collision snapshot was uploaded to Tesla’s servers, the local copy on the car was marked for deletion. Then, “someone at Tesla probably took ‘affirmative action to delete’ the copy of the data on the company’s central database,” according to the Post.

Tesla only acknowledged that it had received the data once the police took the Tesla’s damaged infotainment system and autopilot control unit to a Tesla technician to diagnose, but at that time the local collision snapshot was considered unrecoverable.

That’s where the hacker, only identified as @greentheonly, his username on X, came in. Greentheonly told The Washington Post that, “for any reasonable person, it was obvious the data was there.”

During the trial, Tesla told the court that it hadn’t hidden the data, but lost it. The company’s lawyer told the Post that Tesla’s data handling practices were “clumsy” and that another search turned up the data, after acknowledging that @greentheonly had retrieved the snapshot locally from the car.

Fuck Elon and Fuck Tesla. May they both rest in piss.