For years, Tesla treated a ponytailed, Russian-born tinkerer in Nashville as an asset. The man, known online only by the handle GreenTheOnly — “Green,” to those who work with him — had been cracking open Tesla’s computers since buying his first Model X in 2017, feeding the flaws he found back to the company through its bug bounty program (1). According to Business Insider, which published a deep investigation (2) into his role on July 1, a member of Tesla’s security team offered him $15,000 for each software vulnerability he resolved.
Then Green turned that same skill against the company. Working from a forensic copy of a crashed Model S’s Autopilot computer, he recovered the “collision snapshot” Tesla had long insisted it didn’t have — data that helped land Elon Musk’s car company with a $243 million verdict (3), the largest ever handed down against it and the first time a jury found Tesla liable in a wrongful-death case tied directly to its Autopilot system.
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Tesla’s public bug bounty program, run through the platform Bugcrowd, has advertised rewards from hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars (4) per qualifying finding. This kind of “white hat” arrangement is common across Silicon Valley, where tech companies pay independent researchers to find holes before criminals do. Green, by his own account, stumbled into Tesla’s systems while investigating whether the company was using open-source code without publishing it, and his curiosity only deepened from there.
Benavides v. Tesla
The crash at the center of the case happened just after 9 p.m. on April 25, 2019, on a dark, two-lane stretch near Key Largo, Florida. George McGee, driving a 2019 Model S with Autopilot engaged, dropped his phone and bent to retrieve it (5). The car blew through a stop sign and a flashing red light at roughly 62 mph and slammed into a parked Chevrolet Tahoe. Naibel Benavides Leon, 22, was standing beside the SUV with her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo. She was killed, while he was critically injured.
To prove their case, Angulo and Leon’s family needed the Autopilot computer’s record of what the car’s cameras had seen in the final seconds — a package of crash data that Tesla vehicles automatically transmit to company servers after a collision. Tesla said it never had the full file. A service-center technician who plugged in the computer years earlier had pronounced the data corrupted. That story held up until the plaintiffs recovered the original hardware from the Florida Highway Patrol in 2024 and brought in Green, who had built a following for recovering data from wrecked Teslas and posting his findings (6) — the same work that once made him useful to Tesla.
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