[burner890]

Anyone who thinks this is a loss for Uber doesn't know what was at stake in this case. At one point an injunction against Uber's self-driving division was on the table. If that were still any sort of possibility Uber would have ended up paying far more than a couple hundred million in equity to settle the case.

I think it's safe to say this wasn't really about theft of trade secrets by Uber. We can infer this because Google's lawyers would have known exactly how weak their case against Uber was when nothing of substance turned up as part of discovery. Google decided to go to trial anyway. They knew that Uber's ailing brand would make them _seem_ guilty in the public eye even though they clearly weren't.

I can't prove this, but I think this was a chillingly opportunistic move by Google that was designed mainly to stop the loss of top engineering talent to Uber ATG. After all, who would want to go to join a company which appeared to be in serious legal jeopardy?

I'd speculate that Uber's current leadership saw an opportunity to immediately stop the damage to their brand and took it. Part of me wishes TK were still running the show because he probably would not have settled.