Gimme Some Of That Eff You Money

And I'll save you a lot of money to tell you it ain't worth it.

Two staffers that Bloomberg spoke to called it “F-you money,” and the accumulated cash allowed them to depart Google for other firms, including Chris Urmson who co-founded a startup with ex-Tesla employee Sterling Anderson, and others who founded a self-driving truck company called Otto which was purchased by Uber last year, and another who founded Argo AI which received a $1 billion investment from Ford last week.

In 2015, Google’s parent company Alphabet lost a mind-boggling $3.5 billion on “other bets” like the self-driving project, and lost another billion dollars in the last quarter of 2016 alone. The company has a lot of projects in the “other bets” category, so not all can be blamed on self-driving cars, but the decision to spin off the project into Waymo could make the financials look a bit better.