Photographer: Nina Riggio / Bloomberg
Photographer: Nina Riggio / Bloomberg
A former Software Engineer Tesla Inc. He was ordered to appear before a judge to face charges that, three days after work, he began stealing confidential files and transferring them to a personal storage account.
During his two-week hiatus, which ended on January 6, Alex Khatilov stole more than 6,000 scripts or code files, which automate a wide range of business functions, Tesla claims in its trade secret theft complaint.
Tesla convinced U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers that the threat posed was serious enough that it issued a restraining order on Friday for Khatilov to keep and immediately return all files, records and e-mails to the company and presents before her, at a distance, on February 4th.
Elon Musk’s electric-car manufacturer aggressively pursued lawsuits against others former employees and Rival companies he accused of poaching engineers and stealing property data.
A software automation engineer, Khatilov was hired as one of “a select few Tesla employees” to access files that the company says are unrelated to his job. Tesla says he had to sue Khatilov for lying about his theft and trying to erase his evidence.
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Khatilov said he was surprised and shocked by Tesla’s trial. He said in an interview that after being hired on December 28, Tesla sent him a file containing information for new employees. He said he transferred it to his personal Dropbox cloud account for later use on his personal computer.
“No one told me it was forbidden to use Dropbox,” Khatilov said. “I don’t know why I claim it’s sensitive information, I didn’t have access to any sensitive information.” Companies that want to maintain protection over files normally block their improper installation, he added.
Days later, Khatilov said he showed Tesla’s information in Dropbox when security asked for it 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 warehouse, the engineer said he forgot about them and tried to destroy the data at the beginning of the interview. Tesla says it doesn’t know if it previously copied or sent the files to other locations. Khatilov said in an interview that he did not send them to anyone or anywhere.
“The scripts are extremely valuable to Tesla and would be to a competitor,” the company said in the lawsuit. “Access to these scripts would allow engineers from other companies to reverse 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 reported the case earlier.
The case is Tesla v. Khatilov, 21-cv-00528, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose).
(Add Khatilov’s answer in the sixth paragraph.)