Uber ex-CEO Kalanick: self-driving car beef linked to Google CEO Page's ire over talent loss

A high-profile legal fight is underway in a San Francisco courthouse between Uber and Google-spin-off Waymo, which accuses the ride-hailing company of stealing its self-driving car technology. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick leaves the Phillip Burton Federal Building on day three of the trial between Waymo and Uber Technologies on February 7, 2018 in San Francisco. SAN FRANCISCO -- After two days of legal wrangling, lawyers for Google's self-driving car company Waymo on Wednesday injected a little bit of Hollywood into the protracted corporate scuffle over whether Uber stole trade secrets in its rushed quest to bring self-driving cars to the masses. Michael Douglas' voice rolled through the courtroom: "Greed is right. The iconic video clip from the 1987 movie "Wall Street" attempted to convey a clear message to the jury: Uber is an aggressive, greedy company willing to do anything to win. That sentiment played on Uber's well-documented history of ruthless business exploits that sometimes ran afoul of regulators and business partners. But the anecdote didn't answer the fundamental question the case tries to resolve: whether those tactics extended to stealing eight trade secrets from Waymo as a short cut to developing key self-driving car sensors. That question, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup repeatedly has said, is the crux the case rests on -- and not Uber's oft-compromised reputation of fostering a frat-boy culture that discriminated against women and condoned secretive surveillance programs of rivals. The YouTube clip of cold-blooded financier Gordon Gekko was sent as a link in a 2016 message from then-Google self-driving car engineer Anthony Levandowski to Travis Kalanick, Uber's CEO at the time. Levandowski had expressed dissatisfaction with the pace of progress at Google, and Kalanick was interested in hiring him to fire up Uber's fledgling autonomous car program, something that was seen as critical to Uber's business model. In the text, Levandowski sent Kalanick a link to the video along with the words, "Here's the speech you need to give," followed by two "wink" emoticons. On the witness stand, Kalanick brushed off the suggestion that the link was loaded was significance and sparred a bit with Waymo attorney Charles Verhoeven, who asked Kalanick if he clicked on the link. "I think I would have," said Kalanick. I've seen the video before, and the movie."