An ex-Tesla lawyer received nearly $30 million to ditch Elon Musk's company for a 27-year-old billionaire's self-driving startup

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An ex-Tesla lawyer received nearly $30 million to ditch Elon Musk's company for a 27-year-old billionaire's self-driving startup
Luminar Technologies founder, Austin Russell, holds studio day in New York City on June 15, 2021.Charles Sykes/AP Images
  • Luminar Technologies offered Alan Prescott nearly $30 million to leave Tesla, a SEC filing revealed.
  • The new chief legal officer at the LIDAR startup has over $29.5 million in stock awards for Luminar.
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Luminar Technologies gave former Tesla lawyer Alan Prescott a compensation package worth nearly $30 million to become the company's new chief legal officer last year.

Prescott left Tesla last year to join the startup that develops laser sensors for self-driving cars. The lawyer's compensation package was revealed in the company's 10-K filing that was submitted in March to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and was first reported by Bloomberg.

Prescott has over $29.5 million in stock awards for Luminar, according to the filing. Last year, the company paid him about $205,700 in cash, and his salary was later raised to $300,000, with a $50,000 bonus in November, the company's quarterly report shows.

A spokesperson from Luminar did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.

Prescott currently owns over $21.5 million in Luminar stock, per Bloomberg's data. A source familiar with the issue told Bloomberg that Prescott's compensation package is similar to the one he had at Tesla.

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The former Vice President of Legal at Tesla is a veteran in the automotive industry and has worked on several projects involving autonomous vehicles. Before his stint at Tesla, he spent a decade at Ford and later served as senior counsel for Uber's autonomous-driving unit.

Luminar is an up-and-coming company in the self-driving world. In January, Mercedes-Benz announced it was partnering with the startup and planned to use its self-driving technology for its next lineup of luxury vehicles.

The LIDAR company listed on the Nasdaq stock market via a reverse merger in 2020 and made its 27-year-old CEO, Austin Russell, a billionaire virtually overnight. Last year, Forbes crowned Russell as its youngest self-made billionaire.

Prescott's decision to move to Luminar might appear counterintuitive to some, as it goes against Tesla CEO Elon Musk's philosophies about self-driving tech. In 2019, Musk described Luminar's technology, used by most other self-driving-car firms, as "doomed."

Instead of LIDAR, Tesla relies on a suite of external cameras and other sensors for its autonomous-driving efforts. In October, The New York Times reported that Musk has repeatedly instructed the company's Autopilot team, which works on self-driving car tech, to ditch radar and use only cameras instead, as it most closely emulates the human eye.

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Prescott is not the only lawyer to join Luminar over the past year. The company's 10-K filing revealed that the company has hired two more lawyers to join the startup's board and offered the lawyers, Katharine Martin and Alexander Phillips, compensation packages as high as $636,000 in 2021.

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