I understand, but still find it humorous that Google & Uber now say Levandowski didn't make positive contributions. It's like saying my ex-girlfriend that I lived with for 4 years and moved across the country for, was fat, lazy and a boring conversationalist. Obviously she was also amazing or the 4 years never happens.

Obviously people have both good and bad attributes. It seems pretty clear that Levandowski is a brilliant engineer, with his minor (lol) flaws being arrogance and a psychopathic lack of respect for authority and others.

It's not a unique story. Smart people who solve hugely valuable problems typically do it through obsessive work, this gives them less experience developing acceptable social behaviors, and when they get hugely successful and get to operate without normal social constraints they haven't developed a strong personal judgment to help constrain their behavior.

I once worked at a startup with a brilliant founding developer building a revolutionary new visual programming language. The entire company depended on their efforts, so they didn't get much pushback on their personal behavior. Over years this can be corrosive, and he often was quite the jerk.

Eventually there was a blow up, and the developer left and was forced to work for other companies where he was just an employee, no longer the most important person. I still kept in touch and marveled at how much more self aware he had become, and how much more the inner nice guy I had always known was there had come to the foreground.