WARP Drive process automation code said to be extremely valuable Share
Copy
Tesla has fired and sued software engineer Alex Khatilov for alleged trade secret theft and breach of contract. The electric automaker claims its former employee copied thousands of files to his personal Dropbox account just days after being hired.
The complaint [PDF], filed on Friday in US District Court in San Jose, California, claims Khatilov, also known as Sabhir Khatilov and Alex Tilov, was hired as a senior quality assurance engineer on December 28, 2020, and began copying company files without authorization just days later. Within three days, he began stealing thousands of highly confidential software files from Tesla’s secure internal network, transferring them to his personal cloud storage account on Dropbox, to which Tesla has no access or visibility, the complaint contends. The files consist of scripts of proprietary software code that Tesla has spent years of engineering time