Tesla chief executive Elon Musk is directly assisting investigators in the New Year’s Day Cybertruck explosion outside of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, highlighting both the trove of information the company has on its customers and Musk’s ability to access and share it at his own discretion.
Musk sent a team to Las Vegas to help investigators extract data and video from the charred remains of the car on Thursday and provided footage from Tesla’s charging stations that tracked the suspect as he drove from Colorado to Las Vegas, officials said. Las Vegas Sheriff Kevin McMahill applauded Musk for his assistance and said the Cybertruck contains a “tremendous number of cameras” that may help officials piece together the suspect’s final moments before the explosion.
“The evil knuckleheads picked the wrong vehicle for a terrorist attack,” Musk posted Wednesday on X, the social media site he owns.
The explosion is being investigated by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Officials said the suspect – believed to be Matthew Livelsberger, an active-duty soldier in the U.S. Army – likely died by suicide before the Cybertruck filled with gas canisters and fireworks exploded Wednesday morning.
While authorities can subpoena companies that have information critical to an investigation, Musk’s public involvement in the high-profile case – and his frequent updates and commentary on the case to his more than 200 million followers on X – is unusual for a CEO of a major company. Lawyers with active lawsuits against Tesla drew a contrast between Musk’s eagerness to assist in this case and what they say is Tesla’s far more reluctant stance in sharing the full scope of its data when its vehicle design or technology is alleged to have contributed to a fire or crash.
Brett Schreiber, a personal injury and wrongful death attorney who has several cases pending against Tesla related to its technology and design, said Musk did the right thing by willingly assisting authorities in the Las Vegas investigation. But, Schreiber said, he has repeatedly found himself in discovery battles with the company to obtain the full breadth of information it has on vehicles involved in his cases.
“Tesla vehicles can often be the best eyewitness to a collision or a crime,” he said. “The question is whether Tesla will freely share that information with law enforcement regardless of whether it implicates or exonerates Tesla from responsibility.”
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Don Slavik, an auto defects attorney who also has multiple lawsuits against Tesla, said it can take months to get even partial information from the company – despite the fact that it collects data on its vehicles’ movements “down to the millisecond,” he said.
“Trying to get data from Tesla is very difficult, they don’t want to share information,” he said. “And when they do share it they only share what they want to share.”
Tesla and Musk didn’t respond to requests for comment.
It isn’t clear if Musk volunteered to help in the Las Vegas investigation or was asked by law enforcement.
The billionaire has emerged as a significant figure in the incoming administration, as he and President-elect Donald Trump have developed a close and highly public relationship. Musk spent at least $277 million last year supporting Trump and other Republican candidates and has been tapped to lead a commission on government efficiency.
On Wednesday, Musk posted repeatedly about the Las Vegas incident and said the “whole Tesla senior team is investigating this matter right now.”
McMahill pointed to a confluence of factors in the case that have raised alarms. “It’s a Tesla truck, and we know that Elon Musk is working with President-elect Trump, and it’s the Trump Tower so there are obviously things to be concerned about there, and it’s stuff we continue to look at,” he said Wednesday.
Authorities received a report at 8:40 a.m. that a Cybertruck pulled up to the glass entrance doors of the Trump hotel, started to smoke and exploded seconds later. Video footage shared at a news conference Wednesday showed the Cybertruck suddenly detonate in a massive blast with what appeared to be flashes of fireworks.
The explosion killed the driver, who was the only person inside the vehicle, and seven other people suffered minor injuries, McMahill said.
Hours after the explosion, Musk posted on X that the company has “now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself.” His post came more than an hour before the Las Vegas Police Department officially notified the public of that development.
Photos shared by law enforcement on Wednesday show the charred silver truck outside the tower with the remains of several large fireworks and gas canisters packed into what appeared to be the trunk. The exterior of the vehicle remained largely intact.
McMahill said the fact that the explosion occurred in a Cybertruck “really limited the damage that occurred” at the hotel, though experts who spoke to The Washington Post said the surprising lack of damage could also be a function of the apparently low-grade explosives used in the incident. The glass doors to the tower were spared, despite just being feet away from the entrance.
Investigators have not determined a motive for the explosion and are still looking into potential connections with the attack earlier on Wednesday in New Orleans, where a man intentionally drove a pickup truck into a crowd of New Year’s revelers on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, killing 14 people and injuring dozens of others.
Officials have not officially identified the Las Vegas driver’s identity, as McMahill said the body was “burnt beyond recognition.” The sheriff said there was mounting evidence, however, that the driver was Livelsberger of Colorado Springs.
McMahill said that technology has been very useful in this investigation, and Musk gave authorities “quite a bit of additional information” about how the vehicle was locked afterward because of the force of the explosion. The Tesla CEO also “directly” sent law enforcement video footage from Tesla charging stations across the country, McMahill said, which helped authorities trace the truck’s journey from Colorado to Las Vegas.
Authorities are also looking for anyone who may have been at the charging stations at the same time, McMahill said, “because their vehicles would have also had cameras that would have taped anybody in and around them.” Tesla’s charging stations can only be used by the company’s vehicles.
Tesla is in a singular position to assist in such investigations given the amount of footage its vehicles collect and its network of charging stations that log the exact moments when a vehicle stops for power.
Many cars have access to some location data and camera footage if they’re equipped with parking assistance and navigational systems. But Tesla’s suite of cameras, onboard computers and its charging network provide a higher level of data sophistication.
“It’s hard for me to imagine a Volkswagen executive being able to just pull up all of the data – not just from inside of those vehicles, but from every gas station that someone were to stop at along the way,” said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Tesla’s always-connected vehicles can report data back to the company in real time, a capability that has landed the company in hot water with federal safety investigators in the past when it has sought to establish a narrative on events before safety investigators have completed their work. Because much of Tesla’s data is proprietary, investigators are reliant on the company to interpret some internal data.
The company may stop receiving data once a vehicle is disabled, travels outside a connected area or is badly damaged. The company is not ordinarily required to disclose all of its proprietary internal data, though federal regulators require reporting on certain crashes involving vehicles with driver-assistance features activated.
The company also says vehicle data may be obtained by law enforcement in certain cases, and it has in the past cooperated with federal authorities in extensive crash investigations that have led to public scrutiny and recalls.
Autonomous vehicle companies often say they provide user information if required by law but leave themselves a lot of discretion, said Matthew Wansley, a professor at Cardozo School of Law who focuses on the intersection of law and technology. That decision-making process might be different in the case of an emergency, where a public safety threat dwarfs the likelihood of public blowback around an invasion of privacy, he said.
“On the one hand, every business wants to have a good relationship with local law enforcement,” he said. “But on the other hand, you don’t want consumers to think that you’re just going to be sharing their data without a subpoena.”