Tesla sues self-driving startup Zoox and former employees for alleged trade secret theft - The Verge

Tesla filed two lawsuits late on Wednesday against multiple former employees and the self-driving startup Zoox for allegedly misappropriating the company’s trade secrets. The news was first reported by Business Insider.

The Silicon Valley automaker claims four former employees stole “proprietary information and trade secrets to help Zoox leapfrog past years of work needed to develop and run its own warehousing, logistics, and inventory control operations.”

Tesla also claims in a separate case that a former employee stole trade secrets related to the company’s Autopilot driver assistance feature before taking a job at Chinese electric automaker Xiaopeng Motors, or XPeng.

Tesla says the four former employees who went to Zoox — Scott Turner, Sydney Cooper, Christian Dement, and Craigh Emigh — “absconded with select proprietary Tesla documents useful to their new employer,” and that at least one used confidential information to poach other employees. Tesla says the group’s alleged theft was “blatant and intentional.” The company claims that Turner, who was a manager at a Tesla distribution center, sent two confidential documents to his personal email address with the words “you sly dog you...” It claims Dement, a former warehouse supervisor, did something similar by sending four documents from his work to his personal email with the subject “Good Stuff.”

After Emigh joined Zoox, Tesla says he mistakenly sent an email to Cooper’s old Tesla address, with a modified version of a proprietary Tesla document attached. The document was “freshly-emblazoned with the Zoox logo,” Tesla claims, but still featured hallmarks of the original version, which the automaker says shows “without doubt, that the Defendants are actively using the Tesla information they stole.”

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