Tesla sues former exec for allegedly stealing secrets, poaching workers
Tesla sues former Autopilot director for allegedly stealing secrets, poaching coworkers
A driver rides hands-free in a Tesla Motors Inc. Model S vehicle equipped with Autopilot hardware and software in New York.Christopher Goodney | Bloomberg | Getty Images  Tesla is suing its former director of Autopilot Programs,  Sterling Anderson, for breach of contract.   In a suit filed Thursday in California,  Tesla alleges Anderson took proprietary information about  the Autopilot program and recruited fellow Tesla employees to  work with him at another autonomous driving company.   The lawsuit also names the former head of  Google's autonomous car project, Chris Urmson,  as a defendant, and alleges both executives were attempting to  start a company together, called Aurora.  Aurora responded to the suit by  saying: "Tesla's meritless lawsuit reveals both a  startling paranoia and an unhealthy fear of competition. This  abuse of the legal system is a malicious attempt to stifle a  competitor and destroy personal reputations. Aurora looks forward  to disproving these false allegations in court and to building a  successful self-driving  business."  According to TechCrunch, Anderson had acted as  Tesla's director of Autopilot Programs for a little over a  year.   Tesla alleges that Anderson, while still a Tesla employee,  pulled "hundreds of gigabytes" of proprietary data from company  computers, and installed it on a personal hard drive. Tesla also  alleges that Anderson tried to hide his tracks by wiping phones,  deleting browser histories, permanently erasing computer files,  and even manipulating time stamps on related files, "in an  apparent effort to obscure the dates on which they had last been  modified or accessed."  Tesla also alleges the pair attempted to poach at least 12 other  Tesla employees, though they only successfully recruited  two.   Tesla's suit says the company's advancements in self-driving  technology have spurred traditional automakers to rapidly try to  "play catch up" through acquiring small autonomous driving  startups.   "Automakers have created a get-rich-quick environment. Small  teams of programmers with little more than demoware have been  bought for as much as a billion dollars. Cruise Automation, a  40-person firm, was purchased by General Motors in July 2016  for nearly $1 billion. In August 2016, Uber acquired Otto,  another self-driving startup that had been founded only seven  months earlier, in a deal worth more than $680 million," the  company said in the suit.  Tesla filed the lawsuit in the Superior Court of  California, County of Santa Clara, and is seeking exemplary and  punitive damages of an unspecified amount. The company is also  seeking an injunction, preventing the defendants from engaging in  "further unlawful and/or unfair business acts and  practices directed at Tesla and its employees."  CNBC contacted Tesla representatives, who declined to comment  publicly on the matter. 