It was a Saturday night last March in Buffalo, and Dennis Scott was sitting at home. A stocky veteran with salt-and-pepper hair and a close-cropped beard, Scott had been laid off from Tesla’s factory in Buffalo two months earlier as part of a global reduction in the company’s workforce. Since then, he had taken to sending Elon Musk emails and point-blank tweets, describing the pain the layoffs were causing.

Ten days after Scott was let go, Musk had tweeted a goofy picture of himself posing with what looked like a machine gun. Scott retweeted the image and called Musk a clown. “If I were CEO and someone told me my company wasn’t working right,” he explains, “I wouldn’t be clowning around. I’ve got people counting on me for their livelihood.”

Now, around 10 p.m., his phone rang. The call was from an unmarked number. Scott answered.

“It’s the clown,” the person at the other end informed him.

Scott, unfazed, figured that Musk must have gotten his number from the company. For the next 20 minutes, he recalls, he and his former employer had a civil conversation. “When are you going to fix your company?” Scott asked.

Musk was pleasant but offered no specifics about the Buffalo plant. Scott continued to ask frank questions. “You took $750 million from New York,” he told Musk, referring to the taxpayer money that the state handed Tesla as part of its Buffalo Billion program to revitalize upstate New York. “You gave us hope that you were going to do something.”

Musk’s responses left Scott unimpressed. “Musk is a nice guy when you talk to him,” he says. “But I think he’s full of shit. He’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.”

Musk, after initially telling Vanity Fair that he had “no record” of the call, now denies that it ever took place. In public, he doesn’t talk much about Tesla’s factory in Buffalo—a place he once, in better times, dubbed Gigafactory 2. Gigafactory 1, of course, is Tesla’s much-hyped futuristic electric car plant outside Reno. Gigafactory 2, which is shrouded in silence and secrets, was a controversial side venture: a high-stakes move to dominate America’s growing market for solar energy. Tesla bought the factory’s main tenant, SolarCity, for almost $5 billion in 2016. The plan, in true Muskian hyperbole, was to turn the plant in Buffalo into what was billed as the largest manufacturing facility of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. SolarCity would build 10,000 solar panels per day and install them on homes and businesses across the country. In the process, it would create 5,000 jobs in an area that very much needed them. “This is one of the poorest cities in the country,” Scott says. “You get a big company here, and it’s a big deal.”