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In the last hours of his presidency, President Trump granted a full pardon to Anthony Levandowski, the engineer at the center of a 2017 lawsuit between Google's self-driving car unit and Uber over alleged theft of trade secrets.
Why it matters: The case made headlines as a bitter legal battle between two of Silicon Valley's best-known companies in the race to build self-driving cars.
- Tech investor Peter Thiel, a vocal Trump booster in 2016, was among those who supported Levandowski's pardon.
- In August of last year, Levandowski was sentenced to 18 months in prison, though the ongoing pandemic made it unclear when he would begin serving it.
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