A Trucking Startup Aims to Challenge Tesla. Now, Paychecks Are Missing—And So Is a Truck

Windrose Technology seemed poised this year to disrupt the global trucking industry: $400 million raised to build a cutting-edge electric big rig to rival Tesla’s new Semi truck.

By March, the company was in such disarray that Windrose’s chief executive, Wen Han, was demanding to know where one of his $285,000 trucks had gone.

Two former employees fired in January, Travis Waite and Harold Keller, refused to help locate the vehicle until Han paid them a combined $91,000 in unpaid wages and benefits. They still haven’t been paid, they say, and the truck remains at large.

Han, a 36-year-old with a Stanford master’s in business, disputed Waite and Keller’s accounts and said the dollar amounts they claim are “unfounded.”