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Money isn't everything, especially when you already have lots of it. People are willing to go to great lengths when they feel they're being marginalized.

On January 7, 2016, Levandowski emailed Larry Page with a plea: “Chauffeur is broken,” he wrote, according to a document revealed during the civil suit. “We’re losing our tech advantage fast.” He offered to start a separate self-driving effort within Google but was shot down. A few weeks later, after allegedly downloading those 14,000 files, he resigned. “I want to be in the driver seat, not the passenger seat, and right now [it] feels like I’m in the trunk,” he told Page.

https://www.wired.com/story/anthony-levandowski-put-himself-...

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Reminder, the "tech advantage" that Anthony Levandowski wanted was a complete lack of restraints and safety protocols, an attitude that would later get a pedestrian killed through Uber's self-driving project.

> The car went onto a freeway, where it travelled past an on-ramp. According to people with knowledge of events that day, the Prius accidentally boxed in another vehicle, a Camry. A human driver could easily have handled the situation by slowing down and letting the Camry merge into traffic, but Google’s software wasn’t prepared for this scenario. The cars continued speeding down the freeway side by side. The Camry’s driver jerked his car onto the right shoulder. Then, apparently trying to avoid a guardrail, he veered to the left; the Camry pinwheeled across the freeway and into the median. Levandowski, who was acting as the safety driver, swerved hard to avoid colliding with the Camry, causing Taylor to injure his spine so severely that he eventually required multiple surgeries.

> The Prius regained control and turned a corner on the freeway, leaving the Camry behind. Levandowski and Taylor didn’t know how badly damaged the Camry was. They didn’t go back to check on the other driver or to see if anyone else had been hurt. Neither they nor other Google executives made inquiries with the authorities. The police were not informed that a self-driving algorithm had contributed to the accident.

> Levandowski, rather than being cowed by the incident, later defended it as an invaluable source of data, an opportunity to learn how to avoid similar mistakes. He sent colleagues an e-mail with video of the near-collision. ... He remained in his leadership role and continued taking cars on non-official routes.

From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...

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It's not clear that Levandowski has anything to do with Uber killing Elaine Herzberg. Specifically, the chapter 11 filing in this post says that Levandowski had very little to do with Uber's software. (Which TBH means that he had a very small role there.) And he was fired from Uber almost a year before Herzberg's killing, so we can't hold him accountable for their testing protocols.

Here's a quote from the chapter 11 filing:

In addition, to the extent that any trade secrets were taken and used at Uber, those trade secrets did not come from Mr. Levandowski, but rather a different former Google employee. Indeed, as admitted in Uber’s public statements, Uber’s self-driving software—an area that Mr. Levandowski did not work on at Google or Uber—contained problematic functions that will require it to enter into a license agreement with Waymo for use of Waymo’s intellectual property. Upon information and belief, the Waymo Settlement, entered into after discovery of possible misconduct relating to Uber’s source code, settled issues relating to theft of trade secrets by individuals who are not Mr. Levandowski.