> Perhaps he's innocent?

Perhaps.

However, one of the ways prosecutor maintain a 95%+ conviction rate is to only pursue cases they are extremely confident they could win in court. And sure, just because someone loses in court or pleas out doesn't mean they are actually guilty, but it's the best system we have.

In particular, to bring a white collar case against an extremely wealthy defendant, they must feel they have a pretty good case.

Even then, it seems like they often don't. I just read Chickenshit Club on this subject and recommend it: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Chickenshit-Club/...

Well he appeared to take files from Google / Waymo's repo on the same day as he met with Uber about selling Otto (before Otto even existed). More importantly, Uber very explicitly paid (and handsomely so) for Levandowski's capacity (and a few others) to create lidar-- Uber allotted 20% of Otto golden handcuffs to building a lidar.

https://sc.cnbcfm.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/editor...

If he didn't actually deliver / use Google's files at Uber (I believe they actually may have found he didn't?), he was clearly trying to get the tech in his head and build a crib sheet for what was to come later.

In any case, today he paid $2m in bail and is wearing an ankle bracelet GPS monitor.

Why would Uber immediately settle?

I don't believe this, but just to entertain the possibility that he is innocent, let's try and come up with some dystopian world where he could be:

Imagine all big-corp actually have a book or ledger of IoU's / tabs / etc so that any work for each other goes untaxed instead of reporting reciprocal work done. This would be a way to avoid paying taxes to the state. Once optimized, what's left? Avoid actually paying your employees, you feed the chicken ... but then you eat it: they pay their employees for a prolonged period of work, then they ask another company to seduce the employee in a crime, then you sue the employee (with or without a mock trial surrounding the second company), then the second company settles. If this happens mutually the money of the employees goes back to the employers. If just 2 companies are on the ledger this may become noticable, so larger cycles (A to B, B to C, C to D, D to A) spread over time and in a different order have the same effect.

(I don't believe it's happening ... yet)

EDIT: added " .. yet"

FBI has a 93% conviction rate. He may be but hes going down.

The FBI doesn't have a conviction rate because they do not prosecute cases. The Department of Justice might have a 93% conviction rate, perhaps.