Anthony Levandowski, former chief of Uber's self-driving program, was given notice on Friday
San Francisco:
Uber has fired Anthony Levandowski, the star engineer at the center of its high-stakes legal fight over driverless cars.
Levandowski, the 37-year-old former chief of Uber's self-driving program, was given notice on Friday, according to a termination letter obtained by the Washington Post. He was let go after failing to comply with a judge's request that he turn over thousands of documents that he is accused of stealing from Google's parent company, where he had worked as a senior engineer.
The New York Times was the first to report the news.
Uber also said that he had broken the terms of his employment with the company. Under those terms, Levandowski promised that he wasn't sharing any trade secrets or proprietary information from his previous employer.
The firing is the latest twist in a case that has pit two Silicon Valley giants against one another as they battle over the future of transportation. Levandowski was a senior engineer in Google's self-driving car program, which began building self-driving cars in 2009 and is now called Waymo.
Levandowski is accused of downloading 14,000 documents from his Google computers onto a hard drive and then uploading them into his personal computer. He has refused to share the documents, citing his fifth amendment rights to protect himself from self-incrimination.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
Levandowski, the 37-year-old former chief of Uber's self-driving program, was given notice on Friday, according to a termination letter obtained by the Washington Post. He was let go after failing to comply with a judge's request that he turn over thousands of documents that he is accused of stealing from Google's parent company, where he had worked as a senior engineer.
The New York Times was the first to report the news.
Uber also said that he had broken the terms of his employment with the company. Under those terms, Levandowski promised that he wasn't sharing any trade secrets or proprietary information from his previous employer.
The firing is the latest twist in a case that has pit two Silicon Valley giants against one another as they battle over the future of transportation. Levandowski was a senior engineer in Google's self-driving car program, which began building self-driving cars in 2009 and is now called Waymo.
Levandowski is accused of downloading 14,000 documents from his Google computers onto a hard drive and then uploading them into his personal computer. He has refused to share the documents, citing his fifth amendment rights to protect himself from self-incrimination.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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