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You're here filed a lawsuit against a handful of former employees who went to work at the self-starter Zoox and the Chinese automaker Xiaopeng.
Separate lawsuits filed late Wednesday allege former Tesla employees stole trade secrets and used them at their new places of work. Tesla declined to comment on one or the other of these lawsuits.
Zoox and Xiaopeng, also known as XPeng, have not responded to requests for comment. TechCrunch will update the article as soon as one or the other company responds.
Although the two lawsuits are based on different trade secrets, they share some similarities: allegations that employees took sensitive and valuable information when leaving Tesla.
In a lawsuit, Tesla claims that Zoox, along with four former employees, Scott Turner, Sydney Cooper, Christian Dement, and Craig Emigh, have made "concerted efforts" to steal Tesla's confidential information and trade secrets in order to protect the company. help Zoox to exceed the years of work required to develop and manage its own warehousing, logistics and inventory control operations. Tesla called the theft "blatant and intentional".
In the complaint, Tesla claims that the four former employees "chose proprietary Tesla proprietary documents, useful to their new employer. At least one of them used Tesla's confidential information to target other Tesla employees for hiring by Zoox. In doing so, 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. "
In another case, Tesla claimed that his former employee, Guangzhi Cao, who had worked on the company's autopilot badistance function, stole the source code before stopping abruptly in January and taking a job XPeng. Tesla refers to the company XMotors in its complaint.
"The confidential information of Tesla is not protected in the hands of XMotors or its employees," reads the complaint. "Inspired by and on a mission to beat Tesla, XMotors would have designed its vehicles around Tesla's open source patents and seamlessly imitated Tesla's design, technology and even business model. XMotors has also introduced features called "autopilot" (called X-Pilot) and now employs at least five former employees of the Tesla autopilot, including Cao.
Tesla said it has "spent hundreds of millions of dollars" and more than five years to develop the autopilot. The company claims that Cao's shares put this investment at risk.
"Tesla must learn what Cao did with Tesla's intellectual property, to whom he gave it, and how badly Tesla was injured. Tesla brought this lawsuit to force the return of its valuable intellectual property and protect it against further exploitation, as well as for any other relief that the facts could justify, "says the complaint.
This is not the first time that Tesla or his CEO, Elon Musk, has already filed lawsuits against several employees, some of which are considered retaliation. In 2017, Tesla dropped its lawsuit just weeks after filing its original complaint against Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot, and Aurora, the start-up he co-founded, after the two parties have agreed.
In December, Tesla filed a lawsuit seeking $ 167 million against former employee Martin Tripp, the former employee whom Musk described as a saboteur. The lawsuit, originally filed in June and targeting only $ 1 million at the time, alleges that Tripp stole confidential information and trade secrets and pbaded them on to third parties.
Tripp, filed a formal complaint with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, alleging that Tesla misled investors and endangered its customers.
Read the two lawsuits below.
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