Interesting stuff from the lawsuit. I had assumed it was really high tech stuff like battery design, but instead it was more mundane, but no less secret and proprietary. Sad to say, this happens frequently, and Tesla is absolutely in the right to sue over this. When I was running my own company, and we were only about 40 or 50 employees large, my Director of sales resigned over the weekend. And he took the entire sales and lead database with him. Suing him would have been a distraction, he didn’t go to a direct competitor, and we didn’t have a lot of free cash to mount a lawsuit, so I just let it go. Actually, I even bought back his vested stock options. Which gave me a little bit of satisfaction when the company went public a few years later and he missed out on a lot of money. But had we been bigger or had I been more aggressive, he would have been in a a world of legal trouble as well.
Just to put a bow on these intellectual theft lawsuits against Rivian, here’s something similar: a high level ex google employee busted for stealing lidar self driving code for his new startup (that was acquired by Uber). It didn’t end well. Don’t employees know or get told that corporations have the ability to log and track data movements to/from the company’s own servers? It isn’t much different than a burglar robbing a home that has video cameras recording everything.
Ex-Google engineer Levandowski asks judge not to send him to prison