Tesla sues a former employee for allegedly taking automation files

Tesla hired and then almost immediately fired a software automation engineer earlier in January for allegedly stealing proprietary information about the electric car company. Now the company is suing the engineer.

In a court filing from Friday, Tesla sued software engineer Alex Khatilov for downloading Tesla files to his Dropbox account. Tesla claims he stole thousands of files pertaining to automation for Tesla business processes like supply chain, inventory, product planning, and more. In the suit, Tesla estimates the files represent "200 man-years of work."

Tesla has its own backend software called WARP Drive and the company claims Khatilov, in his first three days on the job, stole system scripts, or code files in the computer programming language Python. Electrek has the U.S. District Court complaint uploaded with all the details of the suit.  Read more...