> “Whatever Google may say about him stealing lidar trade secrets, he was the lidar team at Google,” says someone who worked at the company’s driverless car program. “This is like the Swiss patent office suing Einstein for inventing the theory of relativity while he worked there.”
> Google’s self-driving car project began the following year with ... hardware supplied by Anthony’s Robots. Like 510 Systems, Anthony’s Robots was operated as an independent company. The arrangement—whereby Levandowski was at once a founding member of the Google self-driving car team and a vendor who was also selling technology to other companies—was well-known to Google executives, though it was never publicly disclosed. “Anthony is a rogue force of nature,” says a former Google self-driving car executive. “Each phase of his Google career he had a separate company doing exactly the same work.” According to two former Google employees, founders Page and Sergey Brin tolerated Levandowski’s freelancing because they saw it as the fastest way to make progress. Google’s car team embraced Levandowski’s nature, too. The attitude, says a former colleague, was “he’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-16/fury-road...