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This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more. He was getting a massive salarY, bonuses

• unityByFreedom 6y ago
  Probably a habit built up over time. You don't just go from upstanding guy to con man overnight.
  • pinewurst 6y ago
    Read the stories about him - he was always scamming to move up - specifically how he treated the other people who were helping with his ventures.
    • dbancajas 6y ago
      can you post links of article? are you saying he was not even that good of an engineer?
• albacur 6y ago
  Some people always take the path towards “more.” It doesn’t matter how much they’ve got, if they can find an opportunity for more they’ll take it.
• illustriousbear 6y ago
  People in the security industry have told me that this sort of thing often comes down to ego and self-importance. In Intelligence, people have been caught selling state secrets for 10-20k a pop. The kind of secrets that can land you decades in jail. It makes no sense from a monetary standpoint.
  • ahmedalsudani 6y ago
    One contrast I can think of between people in intelligence and Levandowski is tens of millions of dollars in pay... which actually causes me to agree with you. It seems mostly guided by an overinflated ego and a sense of invincibility. Gotta remember not to drink your own Kool-Aid ;)
  • bduerst 6y ago
    It's likely Levandowski has narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), as is evident by his founding The Way of The Future, which is his own church to worship artificial intelligence.
    • trsohmers 6y ago
      Which I have to believe is a joke based on the end of "The Aviator"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Pbx9mvWPY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_Pbx9mvWPY
    • jonas21 6y ago
      More like The Way of Shielding Assets From Creditors
      • bduerst 6y ago
        Maybe. I took the liberty to look up their 990 form [1] and it looks like it's an empty non-profit (no assets or activity). Interestingly enough, Lior Ron (Otto co-founder) was appointed CEO of the church. 1 - https://990s.foundationcenter.org/990pf_pdf_archive/814/814753507/814753507_201612_990PF.pdf https://990s.foundationcenter.org/990pf_pdf_archive/814/8147...
    • momokoko 6y ago
      You cannot seriously believe “narcissistic personality disorder” is a real thing, right? This has to be the most “it came from social media” I’ve read on HN in a while. Every personality trait you don’t like or is difficult to deal with is not a “disorder”
• ridaj 6y ago
  If I had to guess, I'd say it's actually clearly correlated. The same underlying ego could've driven both the ambition and rewards he got at Google (after lots of rule-bending) and the brazen theft.
  • euix 6y ago
    This. You see this behavior in gamblers who make it big and then lose it big, or in revenge trading. Make a lot of money then lose a lot of money. If you are even luckier you might even be net positive at the end. People who know when to quit will usually not have made that much money in the first place because it's a different personality type almost.
    • hef19898 6y ago
      One can only guess how much survivorship bias is in there
• blihp 6y ago
  For some people, it isn't ever about having enough. It's always about having more. It also might not have been entirely about the money: he could have craved recognition, more power or who knows what else.
  • api 6y ago
    No, it's about dominance and winning. It isn't about the reward. It's about the game.
    • pupdogg 6y ago
      On the money! and the game is like being in the matrix...you’re always trying to bend the spoon even though reality tell you otherwise...in the end, you start believing the spoon is bent, when it’s not
      • TheSpiceIsLife 6y ago
        In reality, the overwhelming majority of fraud and theft never gets prosecuted, and organised crime is an actual thing. We even know governments run drug cartels to fund black-ops, and sell stolen weapons to this weeks chosen side. I don’t have a problem with what Levandowski did. It’s just that stealing from one mega corp to give to a another bunch of overly wealthy and getting caught is sloppy. And makes for a pretty boring documentary or film adaptation.
    • dwd 6y ago
      The reward is just a way to keep score.
  • dylan604 6y ago
    Next, you'll hear Levandowski 2024. Got to always be moving up
  • seanhunter 6y ago
    There's a great quote in "Liar's Poker" where the author's mentor is explaining to him the dissatisfaction he feels even though he got a big bonus. He describes how as you earn more you become ever more jealous of people who are earning even more than you. It goes something like "We never become rich, we simply experience ever-increasing levels of relative poverty".
• scumcity 6y ago
  Corporate politics likely came into play - he was sidelined at Chauffeur and didn't show up to work, if you read the bloomberg articles. Likely he just wanted to make a difference and politics or corporate stupidity got in the way. The irony is that all these tech companies talk about changing the world. Reality is lawsuits and corporate politics.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • techslave 6y ago
    you don’t think google has changed the world??
  • ineedasername 6y ago
    Corporate politics don't make you steal from your company. "Sidelined" wouldn't be a defense for direct embezzlement of funds, and it's not a defense here. If he felt the way you describe, he should have gone off and started his own thing (he did!) maybe sold it for lots to someone else (he did!) and not steal tech from his former employer (fail!) We all get fed up with work politics, not having our opinions prevail, etc. We don't all walk out the door with countless hours and millions of dollars of work product.
• bduerst 6y ago
  >bonuses in the millions Hundreds of millions. As part of breaching his employment agreement by stealing trade secrets, Levandowski had to pay back one of his bonuses, which was $120 million. I mean, part of paying this type of comp is to retain talent. How much more should Google have paid to retain him? Or was this even preventable?
  • cgb223 6y ago
    God what kind of knowledge / training do I need to get that level of bonus?
    • rexpop 6y ago
      You need serendipity.
    • teej 6y ago
      This is the Google version of winning the lottery. Right place, right skills, right time.
      • ponker 6y ago
        No, you cannot compare becoming the world's best self-driving engineer to winning the lottery. This is like becoming Lebron James, it's tremendous talent combined with tremendous commitment.
        • bduerst 6y ago
          That's survivor bias though, isn't it? Hard to see the world's best self-driving engineers when they're not getting caught stealing trade secrets and forced to reveal compensation.
          • ponker 6y ago
            Not really, I can say that for example Karpathy is at the same general level as Levandowski and he hasn't been caught stealing trade secrets.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  Giving up $120mil and going to an American prison, never an easy thing, during a pandemic.
  • ender341341 6y ago
    It sounds like he gets to wait for after the pandemic.
• dllthomas 6y ago
  The existing theories are plenty likely, but I figure I'll toss out a (probably significantly overly generous) alternative. I don't know nearly enough about the situation to really give much of an estimate of the relative likelihoods. Imagine you deeply believe that getting self-driving cars to market ASAP is vital to saving countless lives. And imagine you strongly believe you know how to make that happen. If you aren't being able to do that in your current environment, you might feel compelled to change even if you're getting huge piles of money, and you might be willing to cut corners along the way. How much would you give up, if you were convinced it would save thousands of lives each day?
• radium3d 6y ago
  Judging by the amount of money he was collecting from them, his ultimate reason must have been rage against a manager or coworker unless he just has a totally unusual view on money needs?
• HighlandSpring 6y ago
  A sort of white-collar kleptomania? A thief with a stronger sense of risk management would've quit a long time ago. He felt compelled to keep going perhaps.
• 3327 6y ago
  Judge Alsup said that home confinement would “[give] a green light to every future brilliant engineer to steal trade secrets. Prison time is the answer to that.” From Google >>>> TO Uber >>>> To >>> TOSSING SALAD in jail.
• jimmytidey 6y ago
  The same delusional self belief that gets you to 100 million dollar bonuses sends you to prison. If he was rational he wouldn't have got to the 100 million dollar stage.
• moron4hire 6y ago
  It's the ol' adage, "You don't get to be a billionaire without cheating someone."
  • simonh 6y ago
    That’s a pretty broad brush you’re slapping about there. If you listen to Marxists, employing people to do anything you yourself benefit from is inherently abusive. Property is theft! Or you could ask my father in law what he thinks about that, having grown up under Mao.
    • moron4hire 6y ago
      A company making N billion in revenue is a lot different than its profit, and LOT different than an individual making even one billion of personal wealth. There's a reason the adage is not about millionaires. 1 million, 10 million, even 100 million isn't really "world-changing" amount of money. But 1 billion is, and there are currently just over 2500 people in the world that have at least 1 billion in personal wealth. People don't really understand just how much a billion dollars actually is. It's an obscenely dangerous amount of money for a single individual to command.
      • CarbyAu 6y ago
        I agree with you and want to expand on:"People don't really understand just how much a billion dollars actually is." Billion and it's larger cousin, Trillion(etc and so forth), really are hard for the human mind to grasp. From: https://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-develop-a-sense-of-scale/ https://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-develop-a-sense-... One strategy is to rescale. So, if I am worth 1 million (I wish!) then someone worth 1 billion could treat things as though they were 1000 times cheaper than me. If you could get a $1000 per night hotel for $1 per night, that might change how you live. Further examples left to the reader.
      • simonh 6y ago
        Being a billionaire isn't about money, it's about ownership. Take Warren Buffet as an example, Buffet is "worth" 71 Billion dollars, but what does that actually mean? Buffet doesn't have a vault full of 71bn dollar notes. His wealth almost entirely consists of the ownership of Berkshire Hathaway stock. That means that wealth consists of factories, media companies, property, mines, shops, warehouses and hundreds of thousands of people doing productive work. So by and large, and there are exceptions of course, most billionaires are so because they lead and own huge businesses doing work on which our entire civilisation depends. They gained that control through being effective leaders that know how to build efficient and productive enterprises that employ people like you and me. So what's the alternative? Appropriating their wealth would also involve removing their ownership and leadership of those businesses, and handing it to who? On what pretext, and to who's benefit? Personally I have no problem with people being successful like that. What I think can be a problem is what happens to that wealth when those people die. If a person obtains vast wealth through hard work and contributing to society that's fine, but inheriting that kind of wealth is a different question. I think there's a reasonable case to be made for much higher inheritance taxes and regulation of trust funds.
• WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago
  Although it does not surprise me one bit that you express such a sentiment as it is likely the most common one from that perspective; it is the result of the whole tech industry and even economy that is and has long been a kind of extreme mania of permissiveness and pillage, with next to no push back that would have possibly moderated such behavior, both on a systemic and the personal level that this is an example of. I know that being faced with such a reality will both be instinctually rejected by many as it is a threat to their frame of mind and causes cognitive dissonance just even hearing it, and some will simply not even have the ability to integrate it at all. What, just from looking at all the massive and excessive fraud and graft and "disruption", aka, destruction, of the economy that we have just alone witnessed in our lifetime that is any different than what Levandowski thought he could maybe also get away with on an individual level. He just didn't realize he had to diffuse what he was doing and not make himself an individual and identifiable target. Just alone China has been pillaging and stealing in every conceivable manner over just the last 25 years or so; from all out hacking, to buying up tech companies and IP, to placing engineers in our Universities Inc., to basic industrial espionage, to immigration to place industrial spies in our tech companies, and on and on and on … to little more than the muted chirp of crickets. What would make Levandowski think that he could not have gotten away with what he was doing when we have witnessed nothing but the very same kinds of law and ethical and moral depravity all across the board from top to bottom, left to right, and front to back for decades now? Tech companies have perverted and sold out our whole society as a function of even deeper graft and corruption for many decades now, I am not at all surprised that Levandowski thought he too could get a piece of action; he just made the mistake of not running in a pack like in DC or on "Wall Street" on in the tech sector. He stood out and strayed from the pack in a noticeable manner so they needed to pick him off to avoid wider recognition of what is really going on as we careen off the rails. To put a point on it, it is precisely the utterly permissive, corrupt, and rotten state of not only the whole tech industry; but our whole society and failed and inherently illegitimate government that are the cause of someone like him thinking he could get away with what he did. Because let's be frank, it was a solid bed that he would have gotten away with it considering what everyone else has gotten away with for many decades now.
  • simonh 6y ago
• TuringNYC 6y ago
  >> This guy had such a sweet deal at Google originally, it staggers me that he'd go to these lengths to steal even more. Not sure about this instance but in general, people dont get to some promontory then lose it all doing something illegal/unethical. They often rise up the ranks -- doing illegal/unethical things the entire way up. You just see the time they got caught (the last time) and it seems they could have stopped at step n-1.
• omarforgotpwd 6y ago
  He wanted to ship the technology, not just get paid a lot of money.