Rivian Planning On A Hiring Round While Tesla Lawsuit Looms

• Rivian intends on hiring up to 600 more employees for its Normal Plant.

• Tesla has filed a lawsuit against Rivian alleging it poached employees.

• Rivian filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.

At Rivian’s plant in Normal, Illinois, there are currently more robots than human employees. Rivian wants to change the ratio in order to get ready to finally launch the production of its highly anticipated R1T and R1s electric trucks.

As though the pandemic wasn’t enough, Rivian is currently operating under the weight an of lawsuit filed by Tesla which alleges that “Rivian is knowingly encouraging the misappropriation of trade secrets by dozens of Tesla employees it has hired, including four named employees who allegedly brought “highly valuable” information with them.” This is from the story shared by pantagraph.com.

The lawsuit further contends that: “Tesla has discovered a disturbing pattern of employees who are departing for Rivian surreptitiously stealing Tesla trade secret, confidential, and proprietary information — information that is especially useful for a startup electric vehicle company,” “And Rivian encourages those thefts.”

This obviously limits Rivian’s potential use of Tesla employees as a talent pool. This has not prevented Rivian from filing a motion to dismiss the lawsuit as speculative and done in an effort to “malign” a competitor and “scare” its own employees who were thinking of jumping ship.”

Rivian went so far, in its motion, as to say: “Tesla did not file this case to defend or protect any legitimate intellectual property rights. Tesla sued in an improper and malicious attempt to slow Rivian’s momentum and attempt to damage Rivian’s brand.”

The reasoning here is that Tesla sent an email and letter only a few hours after Rivian secured $2.5 billion in investments. The letter informed Rivian that Tesla was concerned about ex-employees and trade secrets. A week later, Tesla filed the lawsuit.

This is an unfolding story that we will continue to watch.