Former Uber CEO gets grilled in high-tech heist case

Former Uber chief executive officer Travis Kalanick took the witness stand Tuesday, offering his initial response to allegations that he cooked up a scheme to steal self-driving car technology from Google.

Kalanick’s testimony centered on his dealings with Anthony Levandowski, a former star engineer at Google who left its robotic-vehicle project in January 2016. Levandowski subsequently launched a robotic-truck startup called Otto that Uber bought a few months later for $680 million.

Waymo, a spinoff company that inherited Google’s autonomous car project, sued Uber almost a year ago, charging it with the theft of Google technology. Among other things, Waymo alleges that Kalanick and Levandowski conspired to use Otto as a storehouse of Google’s trade secrets in order to give them to Uber.

Kalanick described his talks with Levandowski as a strategic business decision, saying Uber needed Levandowski’s expertise to develop autonomous technology that could replace its human drivers. By the time Kalanick began wooing Levandowski, the once-cordial relationship between Uber and Google was souring. Google was an early investor in Uber, but the companies started to drift apart as it became clear that Google was interested in the ride-hailing market while Uber intended to build self-driving cars.

Kalanick has become one of the most polarizing figures in Silicon Valley during the past year. During the final months of Kalanick’s eight-year reign as chief executive officer, Uber acknowledged rampant sexual harassment within its ranks, a yearlong cover-up of a major computer break-in and a $100,000 ransom paid to the hackers, and the use of duplicitous software to thwart government regulators.

An outcry about Uber’s toxic behavior prompted the company’s investors to pressure Kalanick to resign last June.