In the spring of 2011, a small group of engineers working on a secretive project at Google received an e-mail from a colleague. It’s finally happening, the note read. Anthony is going to get fired. Several of the recipients gathered in one of the self-serve espresso bars that dot the company’s headquarters, and traded rumors suggesting that Anthony Levandowski—one of the company’s most talented and best-known employees—had finally gone too far.

Levandowski was a gifted engineer who frequently spoke to newspapers and magazines, including this one, about the future of robotics. On the Google campus, he was easy to pick out: he was six feet seven and wore the same drab clothes every day—jeans and a gray T-shirt—which, in Silicon Valley, signalled that he preferred to conserve his cognitive energies for loftier pursuits. Often invited to company brainstorming sessions, he was known for having a charismatic (and, to some, annoying) tendency to launch into awkward sermons about the power of technology to change the world.

It was Levandowski who, with his colleagues, had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars. Google had recruited Levandowski and a handful of other roboticists four years earlier, after the group competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge, a government-sponsored self-driving race across deserts in California and Nevada. Most of the race’s competitors had built automated cars, but Levandowski had constructed a self-driving motorcycle called Ghostrider—in part, he later admitted, because he hoped that its novelty would draw attention. Although Ghostrider performed rather pitifully in its début, breaking down a few feet from the starting line, in almost every other respect it was a success: the audacity of Levandowski’s creation, coupled with his talent for charming journalists, made him the competition’s star. The National Museum of American History acquired Ghostrider for its permanent collection, and in 2007 Levandowski—then twenty-seven years old, with only a master’s degree in engineering from U.C. Berkeley—was offered a job at Google worth millions of dollars.

At the time, the company was hoping to dominate the market for navigational services with software that offered turn-by-turn instructions to urbanites seeking the quickest route to the grocery store or the gym. Google was betting that, as smartphones matured, users would willingly hand over digital information about where they were and where they wanted to go—a valuable trove for a company devoted to selling targeted ads. To perfect such software, Google needed on-the-ground details: the exact locations of speed-limit signs on roads; eye-level assessments of which off-ramps were easy to negotiate and which required sudden lane changes. Levandowski and his Grand Challenge teammates had developed a method for inexpensively stitching together thousands of landscape photographs, then combining them with G.P.S. coördinates, in order to plot navigable self-driving paths over dusty hills and creek beds. This technology could be adapted to map city streets, but millions of up-to-date photographs would have to be taken first. After Levandowski arrived at Google, his plan was to send out hundreds of cars, equipped with cameras, to photograph America’s roads. Then he encountered Google’s bureaucracy.

The company was less than a decade old, but it had almost seventeen thousand employees, including a thick layer of middle managers. Levandowski recently told me, “One of the reasons they wanted us was because Larry Page knew we were scrappy—we would cut through red tape.” Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, often complained that the company had become bloated, and had lost the hacker mentality that had fuelled its initial success. By the time Levandowski arrived, Google’s apparatchiks were in ascent.

“Hiring could take months,” Levandowski told me. “There was a program called WorkforceLogic, and just getting people into the system was super-complicated. And so, one day, I put ads on Craigslist looking for drivers, and basically hired anyone who seemed competent, and then paid them out of my own pocket. It became known as AnthonyforceLogic.” Around this time, Levandowski went to an auto dealership and bought more than a hundred cars. One of his managers from that period told me, “When we got his expense report, it was equal to something like all the travel expenses of every other Google employee in his division combined. The accountants were, like, ‘What the hell?’ But Larry said, ‘Pay it,’ and so we did. Larry wanted people who could ignore obstacles and could show everyone that you could do something that seemed impossible if you looked for work-arounds.”

Levandowski and his team were asked to map a million miles of U.S. roads within a year. They finished in nine months, and then set up an enormous office in Hyderabad, India, to begin mapping every street on earth. (Today, Google Maps is the dominant navigation app, used daily by more than thirty million people.) Levandowski and his boss, Sebastian Thrun—another Grand Challenge alumnus—then proposed to Google’s leadership that the next step was developing self-driving cars. In 2009, a small team of engineers, led by Thrun, was assigned to a secret self-driving-car division, which was given the code name Project Chauffeur. Levandowski’s focus would be hardware development.

One of the group’s first objectives was figuring out how to give an autonomous car “eyes”: technology connecting lasers and cameras mounted on the roof to an onboard computer that visualized the road ahead, from traffic signs to pedestrians and other automobiles. Such systems had been created before, at universities, and each had taken years to build. Levandowski again devised a work-around. After joining Google, he had, on the side, created two independent companies, 510 Systems and Anthony’s Robots, which held the rights to technologies that he had developed for his autonomous motorcycle and other outside projects. As he saw it, Google could potentially skip years of redundant research if Project Chauffeur simply bought the necessary hardware from his firms. In effect, Levandowski was proposing to acquire crucial technology from himself, and pay for it with Google’s money.

Google said yes. Although some executives were aware of this unusual arrangement, others were in the dark. “At first, no one really understood that Anthony was selling us his own stuff, but people eventually figured it out,” one of Levandowski’s former colleagues told me. “It seemed shady, but at the same time everyone wanted to move as fast as possible, and this was an easy solution, so we didn’t ask a lot of questions. That ended up being a mistake.”

During the next few years, Project Chauffeur grew to hundreds of employees, and Google spent a small fortune building a fleet of self-driving cars. Transportation is one of the world’s largest industries. If Google could become the first company to bring autonomous-vehicle technology to the marketplace, the breakthrough would be worth billions. Levandowski was central to Google’s plans, but, as Project Chauffeur expanded, his leadership style became increasingly divisive. He was adept at solving problems and at rallying workers, but he was brusque and obsessive, prone to belittle teammates who disagreed with him.

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He also seemed preoccupied by his personal compensation. “We were once driving to a meeting together, and we were talking about how much we wanted to earn from Chauffeur,” one of Levandowski’s co-workers said. “I told him I wanted to make a hundred million dollars, which seemed like a totally inconceivable figure to me. And—I remember this very clearly—Anthony looked over, with this pitying expression, and said I was thinking way too small. He said he expected to make a billion dollars, at least. This technology was going to change the world, and a billion was the minimum of what he deserved.” Levandowski sometimes wore a custom-designed gray T-shirt, a gift from a colleague, that read “I Drink Your Milkshake”—a line from “There Will Be Blood,” Paul Thomas Anderson’s film about a murderously ambitious oilman. “He was that kind of guy,” the co-worker said. “You know, an asshole. But a really gifted one. Our asshole, I guess.”