Photographer: Nina Riggio / Bloomberg
Photographer: Nina Riggio / Bloomberg
A former Tesla Inc.’s software engineer was ordered to appear before a judge to face charges that three days after his work he began stealing confidential files and transferring them to a personal storage account.
During his two-week tenure that ended January 6, Alex Khatilov stole more than 6,000 scripts, or code files, that automate a wide variety of business functions, Tesla said in his complaint of trade secret theft.
Tesla convinced U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that the threat is serious enough that she issued a restraining order on Friday requiring Khatilov to immediately retain and return all files, data, and emails to the company and on February 4 for her to appear.
Elon Musk’s Electricmechanic has aggressively filed lawsuits against others former employees and rival companies it has accused of poaching engineers and stealing property data.
Khatilov, a software automation engineer, was hired as one of the “select few Tesla employees” to access the files, which the company said had nothing to do with his job. Tesla says it had to sue because Khatilov lied about his theft and tried to remove evidence of it.
Tesla to Apple: Help Us Find Out Robocar-Secrets Thief at China Firm
Khatilov said he was surprised and shocked by Tesla’s lawsuit. He said in an interview that after being hired on December 28, Tesla had sent him a file of information for new hires. He said he transferred it to his personal Dropbox cloud account to use later on his PC.
“No one has told me that using Dropbox is illegal,” said Khatilov. “I don’t know why they claim it’s sensitive information, I didn’t have access to sensitive information.” Companies that want to keep protection over files normally block their improper installation, he added.
Days later, Khatilov said he showed Tesla the information in his Dropbox when security asked, and deleted the data at the company’s request. A few hours later, Tesla called to tell him he had been fired.
According to Tesla, after investigators found thousands of confidential files in Khatilov’s personal storage, the engineer said he had forgotten them and tried to destroy the data at the start of the interview. Tesla says it does not know whether he previously copied the files or sent them to other locations. Khatilov said in the interview that he had not sent them to anyone or anywhere else.
“The scripts are extremely valuable to Tesla, and they would also be for a competitor,” the company claimed in the lawsuit. “Access to these scripts would allow engineers at other companies to reverse engineer Tesla’s processes to create a similar system in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.”
The New York Post previously reported on the matter.
The case is Tesla v. Khatilov, 21-cv-00528, US District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose).
(Khatilov adds in the sixth paragraph.)