Tesla Files a Case Against Engineer for Stealing Brand Secrets

Khatilov was hired as an automation engineer and he was also taken in a group of “select few Tesla employees” who can have access to all of the data, which the company says was in addition to his job. Tesla has accused Khatilov of hiding about the conspiracy and trying to eradicate all the evidence regarding the incident and therefore they had to sue him.

Tesla Inc. has pursued a lawsuit against the former engineer and he has been ordered to appear before a judge to face allegations of stealing the confidential data within three days of his job and storing them in his personal accounts. The allegations were also put on the rival companies for poaching engineers from the company. Tesla argues in its trade-secret theft complaint to U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that Alex Khatilov has been stealing more than 6,000 code files or script, that makes a broad range of business functions machine-driven. The threat was so consequential that the judge gave a restraining order to Khatilov, on Friday, to sustain and return all the files, records and emails, stolen by him, back to the company and appear in front of the court reportedly on Thursday, Feb. 4.

Khatilov was hired as an automation engineer and he was also taken in a group of “select few Tesla employees” who can have access to all of the data, which the company says was in addition to his job. Tesla has accused Khatilov of hiding about the conspiracy and trying to eradicate all the evidence regarding the incident and therefore they had to sue him. According to Khatilov, he was at utmost shock after Tesla pursued a lawsuit against him. In an interview, he mentioned that after his hiring on Monday, December 28, he received a file from Tesla that contained detail of the new hires by the company. All the information was transferred by him to his personal Dropbox cloud account for future access on his personal Dropbox.

He said in an interview “Nobody told me using Dropbox is prohibited.” “I don’t know why they claim it’s sensitive information, I didn’t have access to any sensitive information.” Companies wanting to maintain protection over files normally block their improper installation, he claimed. According to him days later, when security asked about the information in his Dropbox, he showed each and every detail to them and deleted the data later, after he was requested to do so. A few hours later Tesla called to tell him he was fired. Tesla claimed that the security personal and the investigators found thousands of confidential files in his personal storage. The engineer claimed that he forgot about them and tried to destroy the data prior to the interview. Tesla doubts that he may have copied files or even transferred the files to other locations prior. Khatilov claims in an interview that he has not read them to anyone or anywhere.

In the lawsuit, the company claimed: “The scripts are extremely valuable to Tesla, and they would be to a competitor,”. “Access to these scripts would enable engineers at other companies to reverse engineer Tesla’s processes to create a similar system in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the expense.” The New York Post reported on the case before. The case is Tesla v. Khatilov, 21-cv-00528, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.