Elon Musk’s brainchild Tesla is suing a former employee for allegedly stealing their company’s information. The charges include allegeded trade secret theft and breach of contract.
Software engineer Alex Khatilov has been accused of grabbing code and files from WARP Drive, a back-end software system. This is a system that Tesla developed to automate a range of business processes involved in manufacturing and selling its cars. They also accuse him of deleting possible evidence when security teams confronted him.
Initially, Khatilov has employed to help Tesla’s Quality Assurance team create software that could automate tasks or business processes related to Environment, Health, and Safety. He began working for Tesla on 28th December 2020.
According to CNBC, the complaint says he began working for Tesla on December 28, 2020, and almost immediately began uploading files and scripts (written in a programming language called Python) to his Dropbox account.
Tesla confronted him about his alleged theft on January 6th.
Khatilov told the New York Post in a statement the software files ended up in his Dropbox by mistake. In fact, he was not even aware of the lawsuit until the paper reached out to him for comment.
