Anthony's efforts led to Streetview and Maps improvements. Waymo is still using his LIDAR research. I think Anthony is totally screwed with this lawsuit, but I wouldn't belittle his engineering accomplishments.
By comparison, after a year of learning to ride a motorbike I barely make it to work each day without shitting myself.
1) http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah... 2) http://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/the-blue-tea... 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bkhviWgSg
The 2005 Grand Challenge was divided into two parts: the national qualification event, where you went around an obstacle course on a closed raceway in an effort to qualify for a limited number of race slots, and the real race, which was a brutal 150 mile course through some pretty gnarly desert terrain.
Blue Team never made it past the NQE, which is why everyone's obsession with the motorbike makes no sense to those of us who actually made it to the real deal.
The Smithsonian's decision to memorialize Levandowski's engineering mediocrity is, to say the least, puzzling.
...and keep in mind that this was done around 1990.
Google clearly thought it was in their best interest, but I stand by what I said: As an engineer, the most well beaten path to wealth is building something that sells. To get paid and not even have to do that is itself something of an accomplishment, though not one I'd be very proud of.
In these types of situations where a lot of money is involved, I've noticed folks are pretty quick to vilify someone with little information aside from the heavily biased info that leaks into the news.
While $120MM in a vacuum does sound ridiculous, it's hard to know (or even put a price on) his true value without understanding his contributions in depth.
This criticism doesn't extend to you, but in general I've seen a lot of the same folks make snap judgements about someone's ability based on what they've read from news and then vehemently decry how job interviews (which yield far more information) aren't effective at judging someone's worth.
Also, if they valued his equity grants at $120mm and he held much, he likely netted far more.
Not many words would be written about his pay day if he made a clean break from google before building a competing product.
It's not belittling engineering efforts if one states that rewarding a non-production research project with 120 million would be adequate in a lot of cases.