How Elon Musk searches for leaks: Lawsuits, mole hunts and secret codes

Elon Musk has again publicly threatened people who leaked information on his sweeping power across the Trump administration. How he’s handled leaks at his companies could be a sign of what’s next for the federal government.

“I look forward to the prosecutions of those at the Pentagon who are leaking maliciously false information to NYT,” Musk wrote hours after The New York Times reported that Pentagon officials were expected to brief the top adviser to President Donald Trump on U.S.-China tensions, including potential war planning. “They will be found.” (POLITICO has reported that the Pentagon briefing will focus on the threats China poses, but won’t include any classified war plans. It was not clear if that was the initial plan.)

Musk’s statement, posted on his social media site X, echos his playbook of berating and pursuing recourse against leakers to snuff out internal sabotage at the tech billionaire’s companies, like the electric vehicle company Tesla, space exploration and defense contractor SpaceX, and X.

These moments indicate how he may move forward with leakers in the federal government.

Here’s how he’s cracked down on leaks.

Musk’s mole hunts

Leaks aren’t always so easy to handle when you can’t identify the leaker.

After Musk bought the company, Twitter’s source code was leaked online and posted on GitHub, a website where software developers can share project codes. It was unclear then who leaked the code.

So in March 2023, the social media site issued a copyright infringement notice against GitHub, which removed the information.

At the time, though, Twitter could not identify the person who leaked the code and sought to subpoena information both on the poster and “for the users who posted, uploaded, downloaded or modified the data” related to the source code leak.

Months later, Twitter leadership, including its CEO Linda Yaccarino, announced she wanted to stamp out leaks — and asked employees to help find any leakers in their midst.

“If you suspect any employee is not protecting Twitter’s confidential information, please report it by submitting a ticket,” read an internal email shared publicly by a then-executive. “If you need guidance or want to schedule training for your team, please email [email protected].”

Secret codes

When Musk wants to find a leaker, he might set a canary trap.

In 2022, Musk revealed on X how he ensnared a Tesla worker who had leaked the company’s private information to the press over a decade ago: The company sent “what appeared to be identical emails to all, but each was actually coded with either one or two spaces between sentences.”

The emails, which he contended were his brainchild, effectively created a fingerprint for every recipient that could be traced if the messages were sent to or published by the press.

Using metadata or unique markers to identify leakers is not unusual. The federal government in 2017 said it relied, in part, on noting that documents obtained by The Intercept were “folded and/or creased” to determine which employee leaked it, and printed documents can have unique identifiers on them.

People have since found ways around these traps to leak information to the press securely. Some have taken photos of internal communications on other devices. Or they’ve turned to encrypted messaging platforms like Signal to chat with reporters.

In the courts

When a former Tesla worker allegedly stole confidential information, merged it with falsehoods and leaked it to the media, the company swiftly filed a lawsuit against them in 2018. The lawsuit claimed Tesla employees had already identified the hacker by the time the complaint was filed through an internal investigation in which the man confessed he wrote software that transferred heaps of data externally.

But Musk has realized the mere threat of a lawsuit is an equally powerful tool to silence many testy employees.

Musk’s Tesla warned staffers in 2019 that if they leaked information, they could be sued by the company, which had filed a couple lawsuits against employees who allegedly took company information to competitors, CNBC reported at the time.

And in December 2022, months after the Twitter source code leak, the company said in an internal email that “if you clearly and deliberately violate the NDA that you signed when you joined, you accept liability to the full extent of the law & Twitter will immediately seek damages,” according to an email tech journalist Zoe Schiffer obtained.

Staff at Musk’s companies have largely been tight-lipped in recent years, particularly after he hired people loyal to the companies' missions and himself. Now, it is possible the same blueprint could come into play in the federal government, months after the Trump administration seeded some federal agencies with the tech billionaire’s acolytes.