Sources: Anthony Levandowski worked for Larry Page's flying-car firm, Kitty Hawk, before leaving Google, signaling how highly Alphabet executives regarded him
Jack Nicas / Wall Street Journal :
Context & Ripple Effects
Larry Page had already been running two flying-car bets in parallel — over $100M into Zee.Aero plus backing of rival Kitty Hawk — when the Wall Street Journal reported that Anthony Levandowski worked for Kitty Hawk before leaving Google. That detail lands mid-way through the Waymo-Uber litigation, where Google had already disclosed Levandowski's $120M in incentive pay and accused him of working on competing projects before his exit.
The report reframes the story: the engineer at the center of the trade-secrets fight wasn't just poached by Uber — Alphabet's own leadership had him engaged on an outside venture while he was still on the payroll. He later resurfaces in autonomous trucking via stealth startup Kache.ai, while Kitty Hawk's own trajectory turns rocky within two years.
First-order effects
- Waymo's case against Uber gains a new factual thread: if Levandowski was already doing outside work for Page's Kitty Hawk before leaving, the defense narrative shifts from 'engineer defected' toward 'Alphabet tolerated parallel commitments by its top autonomy talent.'
- Kitty Hawk and Page personally face scrutiny as the unnamed counterparty — a founder-backed side project that employed a Google executive without, so far as reporting shows, any public disclosure.
Second-order effects
- Uber's legal team can use the Kitty Hawk connection to argue competing loyalties were normalized inside Alphabet, pressuring Waymo's damages theory and settlement calculus.
- Other Alphabet-side projects — including Zee.Aero — get pulled into questions about how many unannounced engagements Page's vehicles had with Google employees, raising diligence risk for future hires and investors around those firms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the autonomy talent wars push companies toward explicit moonlighting and conflict-of-interest contracts, because informal founder-sanctioned side work proved litigable after the fact.
- Founder-funded skunkworks like Kitty Hawk sit structurally between corporate employment and independent startups — a gray zone that this episode shows can generate billion-dollar litigation exposure rather than optionality.
The trend: Self-driving's defining lawsuit is exposing how loosely Alphabet governed its star engineers' outside commitments, turning founder-backed side projects from perk into liability.