Tesla just took a major shot at Uber's purchase of Otto
REUTERS/Rebecca Cook
The lawsuit itself actually has nothing to do with Uber. In the suit, Tesla accused its former Autopilot director Sterling Anderson of taking company data to use for a competing self-driving-car company, Aurora Innovation. The lawsuit also names Chris Urmson, the former tech lead of Google's self-driving-car unit, as a defendant, calling him Sterling's business partner at Aurora.
But while detailing Anderson's motive for starting the company, Tesla took a shot at both Uber and General Motors. After establishing Tesla Autopilot as a leader in the self-driving-car space, the lawsuit reads:
"In their zeal to play catch-up, traditional automakers have created a get-rich-quick environment. Small teams of programmers with little more than demoware have been bought for as much as a billion dollars. Cruise Automation, a 40-person firm, was purchased by General Motors in July 2016 for nearly $ 1 billion. In August 2016, Uber acquired Otto, another self-driving startup that had been founded only seven months earlier, in a deal worth more than $680 million."
Tesla's lawsuit alleges that Anderson and Urmson started the company knowing their credentials might make it an attractive candidate for an acquisition by a major company - even if their product doesn't warrant it.
Uber and GM both declined to comment for this story.
Anthony Levandowski, a co-founder of Google's self-driving-car unit, left the tech giant to start Otto, a self-driving truck startup. Uber acquired Otto for $680 million in stock with the agreement it would give the startup 20% of its trucking profits in August of last year, Recode reported.
GM reportedly dropped a ton of money on Cruise Automation, paying more than $1 billion, in cash and stock combined, in March of last year. Before being bought by GM, Cruise Automation was a self-driving-car startup based in San Francisco that was founded in 2013.
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