Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech

Re:Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech by Fricken on Friday September 15, 2017 @05:36PM (#15260969)

I wonder if this includes the 'Fuck you money' engineers on project Chauffeur received for passing certain milestones. Earlier in the depositions it was disclosed that Levandowski was paid a 120 million dollar bonus, though it wasn't revealed how much was given to others on the project.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-13/one-reaso...

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Re:Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech by nostrademons on Friday September 15, 2017 @05:55PM (#15261095)

Levandowski's $120M was an earn-out from the acquisition of his startup:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/t...

(Note the date: this is well before Otto and the Uber/Waymo flap.)

It probably is counted in the $1.1B spent on self-driving tech though.

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Re:Google Has Spent Over $1.1B on Self-Driving Tech by Fricken on Friday September 15, 2017 @06:12PM (#15261211)

It was disclosed in the depositions that the 510 systems acquisition was worth about $20 million:

http://www.foxbusiness.com/features/2017/05/23/how-star-engi...

The bonuses were paid out at the end of 2015. It was shortly after that that Levandowski revealed Otto to the world. Plus Chris Urmson started Aurora, and Brian Salesky went on to become CEO of Argo, which is Ford's autonomous Driving subsidiary.

They all got some kind of huge bonus. It supposedly amounted to a 14% rise in the aggregated quarterly expenses of Alphabets 'other bets', which lumps together a bunch of Alphabet's moonshot subsidiaries.

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