THE UBER-WAYMO LAWSUIT GETS A NEW STAR—AND TAKES A WILD TURN

WHEN WAYMO, THE autonomous car company once known as Google’s self-driving car outfit, announced it was suing Uber for trade-secret theft in February, the action seemed to center on a single person: Anthony Levandowski. According to Waymo, the former Google engineer downloaded 14,000 secret documents from its system and used the contents to launch his own self-driving truck startup, Otto, in January 2016. By August, Uber had acquired Otto for a reported $680 million, and Waymo says the ride-hailing giant was in on the theft from the start.