The company said on Friday that within three days of being
hired, software engineer Alex Khatilov “brazenly stole thousands of trade
computer scripts that took Tesla years to develop” and transferred them to his
personal Dropbox, a cloud storage service.
Tesla said that when confronted by Tesla’s security team,
Khatilov claimed he had only transferred “a couple of personal administrative
documents”, whilst trying to delete the evidence. Khatilov told the New York
Post the software files ended up in his Dropbox by mistake when he had been
trying to make a backup copy of a folder on his computer.
Tesla said the files, which represented “200 manyears of
work”, were extremely valuable to both the company and its competitors, as they
could provide “a roadmap to copy Tesla’s innovation.” It said Khatilov’s team
made up the handful of Tesla employees — 40 out of 50,000 — that had access to
the scripts, but that they “had nothing to do with his responsibilities.”
Tesla’s security team detected the file downloads on January
6, after Khatilov was hired on December 28, and confronted him via videocall as
he was working from home, according to the court filing.
Tesla said during this call, Khatilov delayed sharing his
screen with the team, during which time “he could be seen on videochat
hurriedly deleting information from his computer.” However, investigators were
still able to view thousands of confidential files uploaded to his Dropbox,
which Khatilov "claimed he somehow 'forgot.”