⚖️ Uber paid Waymo $245M; Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months

Uber paid roughly $245 million in its own stock to end Waymo's trade-secret lawsuit, and it did so five days into the trial. The engineer at the center of the case, Anthony Levandowski, later pleaded guilty to one count of trade secret theft, was sentenced to 18 months, and was pardoned. Uber has never accepted that Waymo's secrets ended up in its cars. That is the whole ledger in one breath. The rest is how each side got there.

The claim

Waymo sued Uber and its subsidiary Otto in February 2017. In a post on Medium that month, Waymo said Levandowski downloaded "over 14,000 highly confidential and proprietary design files" six weeks before he resigned, and that the haul came to 9.7 GB. It also said he "wiped and reformatted" his laptop afterward. The trigger, Waymo wrote, was a supplier that "apparently inadvertently" emailed it drawings of what was purported to be Uber's LiDAR circuit board, which bore "a striking resemblance" to Waymo's own.

"Misappropriating this technology is akin to stealing a secret recipe from a beverage company."

Waymo, in a Medium post dated Feb. 23, 2017

The money question was large. The Washington Post, via AP, reported that a Waymo expert had put the damage from the alleged theft at nearly $2 billion. Judge Alsup refused to let Waymo use that figure at trial. Uber had bought Otto for $680 million, per the same report.

In May 2017 the judge declined to shut down Uber's self-driving program but barred Levandowski from working on lidar. The New York Times quoted his ruling: Waymo had shown "compelling evidence" that Levandowski downloaded over 14,000 confidential files, and Uber "likely knew or at least should have known" he had kept them. That was a ruling at an early stage, not a verdict.

The answer

Uber's line was blunt. Associate general counsel Angela Padilla said in a statement quoted by The New York Times: "We are very confident that Waymo's claims against Uber are baseless and that Anthony Levandowski has not used any files from Google in his work with Otto or Uber." Ars Technica reported that Uber did not deny Levandowski may have taken files, but maintained its technology was built independently.

Levandowski himself said little. His lawyers told the court he was invoking the Fifth Amendment, the US right against self-incrimination, because of the "potential for criminal action." Uber fired him in May 2017. A spokesperson told Ars Technica he missed a deadline to cooperate with the company's internal investigation.

When he was indicted in 2019, his lawyers at Ramsey & Ehrlich LLP said: "He didn't steal anything, from anyone." Seven months later, according to Reuters, he agreed to plead guilty. In court papers he wrote: "I downloaded these files with the intent to use them for my own personal benefit."

Uber's chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, took a different tone after the settlement. He said the company still maintains Waymo's trade secrets never made it into Uber's autonomous cars, but expressed "regret" for the company's actions while Travis Kalanick ran it, per AP. Kalanick and Uber deny using any Google technology.

What the record settles, and what it leaves open

Settled by a court: Levandowski pleaded guilty to one of 33 counts. The Justice Department said the file at issue was an internal tracking document, and the agreed loss estimate was up to $1,500,000. Judge Alsup sentenced him to 18 months, a $95,000 fine, $756,499.22 in restitution and three years of supervised release. Prosecutors dropped the other 32 counts.

The money did not stop there. The New York Times reported that a court confirmed an arbitration ruling in March 2020 ordering him to pay Google $179 million, and that whether Uber had to cover it under his indemnification agreement was disputed. A White House statement then announced a full pardon, saying he had "paid a significant price for his actions." Levandowski said his family was "grateful for the opportunity to move forward."

Left open: the civil case ended in a settlement, not a judgment. No court found that Uber used Waymo's secrets, and Uber says it did not. The Harvard Journal of Law & Technology noted Waymo's lawyers were sanctioned for slow progress and that some questioned whether Waymo had a strong case. Waymo took the equity and a promise that its confidential information stays out of Uber's autonomous vehicle technology. MrMoney's reading: $245 million, paid in paper, to avoid finding out.