Elon Musk's Tesla sues former employee for stealing 26,000 confidential files

A software engineer has been sued by the Elon Musk-owned automobiles company, Tesla, for allegedly stealing 26,000 confidential files.

Alex Khatilov, a former employee of the company, had allegedly stolen tens of thousands of confidential files from Tesla within three days of joining the company.

He "brazenly stole thousands of trade computer scripts that took Tesla years to develop" and transferred them to his personal Dropbox account, as per Musk's company.

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However, Khatilov has denied these accusations and has claimed he was only transferring "a couple of personal administrative documents". The company's security team claims he was trying to delete the evidence.

Khatilov said he was trying to make a backup of his folder on his computer and ended up copying the software files by mistake.

Tesla, on the other hand, is not believing their former employee's defense. The company said the stolen files represent "200 man-years of work" and are "a roadmap to copy Tesla's innovation", making these documents extremely important for the company and their competitors.

Khatilov is one of the 40 employees — out of nearly 50,000 — to have access to these highly confidential scripts. However, the company also said that they had "nothing to do with his responsibilities".

The theft was discovered by Tesla's security team on January 06 and was confronted by the team through a video call as he was working from home after joining the company on December 28.

Tesla also claimed that Khatilov had delayed sharing his screen during the video call and also "he could be seen on video chat hurriedly deleting information from his computer."

The former employee has denied this being adeliberate action and said, "When it happened, I was shocked. I didn't lie (about) anything"