Tesla sues former employees, accusing them of stealing confidential information and giving it to his rival Zoox

• Tesla accuses four former employees, who are now working for Zoox, a robo-taxi company, to have stolen confidential information.
• The company says in a new lawsuit that these documents helped Zoox "leapfrog" for years of work on autonomous cars.
• More than 100 former Tesla employees are now working for Zoox, who recently installed a new CEO.

Tesla has accused four former employees of Zoox, a robo-taxi company, of stealing confidential information and trade secrets.

In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the US court in northern California, Tesla said the robbery had allowed Zoox "to surpbad the years of work required to develop and manage its own warehousing, logistics and logistics operations. inventory control ".

Zoox did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tesla said the employees – Craig Emigh, Christian Dement, Sydney Cooper and Scott Turner – had breached the terms of their employment agreement with the electric car manufacturer by transmitting confidential information from professional email accounts to addresses. and by hiring former Tesla colleagues.

"As a condition of their employment, all individual defendants agreed to preserve the confidentiality of Tesla's information and to avoid poaching their employees less than a year after their departure," the lawsuit says.

According to the court documents, Turner forwarded internal inventory documents and other company diagrams from his Tesla email to a personal address accompanied by the note "Your Sneaky Dog" about a month before resigning. The same day, says Tesla, he sent more confidential documents with the note "Ooooh man … so much time and effort.I loved every second."

Dement, a former Tesla warehouse supervisor, has also forwarded documents to his personal email address, claims Tesla, with the purpose of "good things".

It would be an error of Emigh, however, that would have brought Tesla to inquire about the activity.

"After the defendant Emigh had joined Zoox, he mistakenly sent an e-mail to Cooper's old email address, Tesla, enclosing a modified version of a proprietary document. Tesla, freshly emblazoned with the Zoox logo, while retaining the layout, design and other remnants of the Tesla Version – showing, no doubt, that the defendants are actively using the information that they have. they stole from Tesla, "said Tesla in his complaint.

The four accused employees did not respond to Business Insider's requests for comment.

Tesla has already sued his former employees. CEO Elon Musk in 2018 accused Martin Tripp, a self-identified whistleblower, of sabotaging the company fleeing confidential information to Business Insider. Tripp says that it has never hacked the information and shared it only for the sake of public safety.

More than 100 former Tesla employees now work for Zoox, based in Foster City, according to LinkedIn. Zoox, who is now four years old, recently named Aicha Evans, Intel's veteran, after ouster his founder in August. The company, worth $ 3.2 billion, has raised $ 790 million in venture capital to date.

"The flight here was blatant and intentional," Tesla said on the record. "During the process, they hijacked Tesla's trade secrets, violated their agreements with Tesla and breached their duty of loyalty, all with the knowledge and support of Zoox."

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