"Besides, Lewandowski couldn't realistically raise money through proper channels if his pitch amounted to, "I stole stuff from Waymo."

yes he could, the team and him had a killer track record and he wouldn't admit to stealing anything from Waymo

"He joined Google in 2007 as part of its Maps team and helped to build the company’s Street View product. When Google gave the green light to begin working on a self-driving car in 2009, Mr. Thrun picked Mr. Levandowski for the original team.

Mr. Levandowski gained some notoriety within Google for selling start-ups, which he had done as side projects, to his employer. In his biography for a real estate firm, for which he is a board member, Mr. Levandowski said he sold three automation and robotics start-ups to Google, including 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots, for nearly $500 million. After this story was published, the real estate firm updated its website erasing Mr. Levandowski’s biography and said that it had “erroneously reported certain facts incorrectly without Mr. Levandowski’s knowledge.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/technology/anthony-levand...

"And yet, one of Google’s most strategic acquisitions has mysteriously been actively blocked from public view. An investigation by IEEE Spectrum has uncovered the surprising fact that Google’s innovative self-driving car and the revolutionary Street View camera technology that preceded it were largely built by 510 Systems, a tiny start-up in Berkeley, Calif."

http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...

So this person(Lewandowski) is fantastically wealthy then? Why was he still at Google then? I'm guessing he was on an earn out schedule?

Why would he need to steal if he had that kind of money already?

Not going to imply he stole, but rephrasing the question as why would someone really rich want to steal?

Greed.

It's why politicians who have enough money for several generations continue to take more and more bribes. (I live in Sri Lanka and witness this on a regular blatant basis).

Enough or more than enough isn't a reason for human nature to not want more. It actually seems to be a driver to get more by any means. (my assumption )

Maybe it wasn't about the money and he just wanted to continue working on autonomous vehicles on new terms for a different parent company, without losing all the previous work.

This is also stealing in my opinion, but it might be a little more nuanced than for pure greed.

Greed

Sure. If this individual did actually steal these, it really demonstrates the poisonous nature of greed. I'm not sure how else to explain the failure to quantify the the risk of getting caught which seems to be sufficiently high.

That was definitely a red flag, but for me it would have to be how quickly Otto was able to develop the 64 laser LiDAR circuit board in such a short amount of time. This was a circuit board that reduced the cost of LiDAR by an order of magnitude and Otto was able to design and build it in 6 months. Additionally, the orchestration of the events leading to the acquisition were clearly premeditated.

In hindsight, a better crook would have accepted outside funding just to cover this line of attack (Assuming the Otto Founder is guilty; of course it might be otherwise).

Due diligence during funding is designed to uncover these kinds of IP issues. That would probably have been a larger risk.

They could have taken capital from Uber to fund themselves and then waited longer for Uber to acquire them.

I think that's his point. In this scenario, you can't raise any meaningful amount of outside funding without either getting very lucky, coming clean about your crime, or raising very small amounts. You go to a prospective VC and tell them you're going to be a super-successful self-driving car with an exit of $1b. 'Why? What makes you so awesome?' 'Well...' Either you tell them the truth, you give up a large fraction of equity just to get a token $1m investment, or you go away with $10k for 1%. In the first case, they may blow the whistle on you; in the second case, you reduce your eventual payment by a lot just for some dubious plausibility; and in the third case, you have the hassle of outside investment for no real plausibility at all.

Mechanisms for self-funding are not always transparent. For example, someone might have given him an enormous private loan that he repaid after Uber bought Otto. For example. In a hypothetical universe.

Has there ever been an indication into what stuff was actually stolen? The only evidence I've seen so far has been of old hardware (LIDAR interface boards etc.). That's hardly anything to construct a grand buyout conspiracy about.

However, if the stolen material had the results of years of training data generated from all the trial runs, that would be Google's only edge in the whole market.

It's possible that specialized hardware is also a valuable trade secret. Or perhaps simply the method of manufacturing such hardware cheaply enough to produce one for every vehicle.

In the filings, Waymo claims that even the identity of a LiDAR component supplier is a trade secret (because of how long it took them to vet the different suppliers).