Tesla says it has uncovered a “disturbing pattern” of former employees who took confidential information and business secrets on their way to new jobs at startup EV Rivian, according to a new lawsuit first reported by Bloomberg. Tesla even claims that Rivian is “knowingly encouraging” this behavior, and is seeking unspecified punitive damages for what he claims is “contemptible, pointless, oppressive, deliberate, malicious, [and] duplicitous conduct ”. Rivian calls the allegations “unfounded.”
Rivian is perhaps the richest EV startup in the world, raising over $ 5 billion in the past year and a half. It is slated to begin delivering a premium electric van in early 2021, before Tesla’s Cybertruck is supposed to hit the road. The company will also start selling an electric SUV at the same time. Rivian has hired some 2,400 employees ahead of this launch from blue-chip companies in the auto and tech industries, including 178 former Tesla workers, according to the lawsuit, with 70 leaping directly.
The lawsuit, filed late last week, names four former Tesla and Rivian employees as defendants, although Tesla says it has identified other people who may also have stolen and brought confidential company information to startup EV.
“We admire Tesla for its leadership in restoring expectations of what an electric car can be,” a Rivian spokesman said in a statement. “By joining Rivian, we require all employees to confirm that they have not, and will not, introduce the intellectual property of former employers into Rivian’s systems. The allegations in this lawsuit are unfounded and run counter to Rivian’s culture, spirit and corporate policies. “
Tesla says two of the named defendants admitted to taking confidential information. One of them is Tami Pascale, who was a senior manager in Tesla’s personnel department. Tesla says that a day after Pascale signed Rivian’s offer letter, she “took at least ten confidential documents and owners of the Tesla network,” including lists of candidates, information on where the automaker finds possible hires and a “detailed internal report of a candidate at the executive level”.
Tesla says Pascale initially denied this when confronted by the company’s investigative team in early July, but that he ultimately “confessed to taking the confidential and proprietary documents.” However, Pascale allegedly did not agree to delete the files, and the company claims that he still has his work laptop. Tesla says he shared his phone screen with one of the company’s investigators, and that when asked to search for the company’s name, “numerous files” were seen, but Pascale “abruptly ended the session.”
Jessica Siron, who was manager of Tesla’s environment, health and safety department, allegedly sent documents to her personal Gmail account three days after signing a Rivian offer letter. Tesla claims that Siron initially denied doing this when confronted by his investigative team, but that he admitted to sending a document when pressured.
Tesla’s complaint is light on details about Rivian’s knowledge or encouragement of any wrongdoing, except for the case of Kim Wong, who was a recruiter at Tesla until just a few weeks ago. Tesla claims that Wong was contacted by a Rivian hiring manager who told him that “Rivian did not have the recruiting templates, structures, formulas or documents that would be necessary” to increase the startup’s recruiting efforts, according to the complaint. The same day as that conversation, Tesla says Wong sent “at least sixteen highly confidential recruiting documents from the Tesla network to his Gmail account,” including confidential Powerpoint presentations containing details of the manufacturer’s recruiting and hiring process. auto as well as salary information.
Rivian’s associate attorney general, according to Tesla, took an “arrogant attitude” toward the allegations and “claimed that taking confidential information was common in the industry.” Rivian tells him The edge disagrees with this framework. “In good faith, we discussed with Tesla the seriousness with which we take any allegation. This document misrepresents a conversation between lawyers, “said the spokesman.
Tesla says in the lawsuit that it was able to resolve all of this because its research team “recently acquired sophisticated electronic security monitoring tools.” Tesla’s investigative team, over the years, has been accused of hacking and spying on employees more than once.
The Tesla lawsuit is the latest in what has become a steady stream of trade secret fights between Silicon Valley shipping companies. Most notable was Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber, in which he accused Anthony Levandowski of stealing treasures of autonomous car data and conspiring with then-CEO Travis Kalanick to pasture that data to Uber. (The lawsuit was finally settled.)
This is also not Tesla’s first trade secret lawsuit. A lawsuit against Zoox, a self-employed startup, was recently settled, resulting in Zoox admitting that several Tesla employees it hired arrived with stolen documents. In 2019, Tesla sued a former employee for allegedly bringing trade secrets to Chinese startup EV XPeng. That lawsuit is entering the discovery phase, but the former employee already admitted in a court filing last year that he uploaded the autopilot source code to his personal iCloud account.
A former Apple employee was arrested in 2018 for allegedly stealing trade secrets while also trying to get a job with XPeng.
