Tesla Asks Apple for Help Regarding Alleged Stolen Trade Secret Lawsuit

The stolen trade secrets lawsuit against an engineer is a hugely important one for Tesla. In order to succeed in winning the lawsuit, the company has contacted tech giant Apple for help.

The world of tech at the very highest levels can be incredibly cutthroat. Over the years, there have been many instances of employees stealing key trade secrets before moving on to work for a competitor. That is what electric car manufacturing company Tesla has accused a former engineer of doing. The electric car manufacturing company has claimed that a former engineer, who had been part of its Autopilot project had taken large amounts of information and then moved on to work with Tesla’s competitor XMotors.ai. XMotors is a company that is involved in research and is owned by Chinese company Xpeng. That being said, it is important to point out that the lawsuit is still in the preliminary stage and Tesla would need to conduct its own fact-finding mission of sorts in order to make its case.

Tesla wishes to go through the former employee’s e-mails and then conduct a thorough analysis of the electronic devices owned by him, which includes an iPhone. However, in order to conduct such forensic analysis on an iPhone, the company would need to have cooperation from Apple and it has emerged that the tech giant has been served a subpoena by Tesla. More often than not, tech giants like Tesla and Apple do not usually cooperate, particularly when the latter is actually looking to get into the autonomous vehicle as well. That being said, in some reports, it has been stated that Apple could consider helping Tesla since at the end of the day Xpeng is a common adversary for these companies.

The engineer in question, Guangzhi Cao revealed that he had saved several files during his tenure as an engineer in the Autopilot project, into his iCloud account. However, Cao insists that he had not engaged in any kind of wrongdoing with regards to the information that he had saved. On the other hand, Xpeng has stated that it believes in fair business practices and stated that it had nothing to do with Cao’s actions.