Tesla has filed a lawsuit against four former employees, accusing them of stealing trade secrets and offering them to a rival company. According to the complaint, the former Tesla employees gave confidential information to autonomous vehicle start-up Zoox.
The documents allowed the start-up to accelerate the development of its technology by taking cues from Tesla's proprietary work. According to Tesla, the ex-employees violated the terms of their contracts by forwarding information from their work email to personal accounts.
The information includes inventory documents, company schematic, and other important information. Tesla claims to have caught on the alleged scheme when one of the former employees who now work ar Zoox mistakenly sent an email to a Tesla employee's old work email account. The email contained an image of an internal Tesla document, unaltered from the original but had a Zoox logo.
Zoox is a California-based company that has a considerable amount of ex-Tesla employees. According to a report by Business Insider, the company has hired over 100 former Tesla workers. We will have to wait and see whether or not the companies come to an agreement over the recent matter. A similar situation occurred when an engineer joined Uber after leaving the Google-owned autonomous car firm Waymo and took over 14,000 company files with him.
Well, Elon Musk has already made all the Tesla patents public. In a blog post, the billionaire said that the company "will not initiate patent lawsuits against anyone who, in good faith, wants to use our technology."