Sean Hollister

July 16th, 2018, in a reply from Dave Sobota:

The direct investment route had Google internally proposing to invest ~$2B in exchange for a ~20 percent stake of Epic. Google wrote: “Will require a substantial investment to gain influence.”

The Tencent / controlling interest route sounded very tentative:

Update: Fixed typo and added a line about “Yeti” that I missed copying over.

“Investment was the only way people could realistically think of to sway them on Epic’s approach to Android,” reads part of an email from Google’s Don Harrison.

Here’s the full email from July 16, 2018:

Pichai would not, but we’re seeing an email from 2018 where he suggested that Philipp, Sundar, Ruth [Porat, Google’s CFO], and Kent [Walker, Google’s CLO] should be involved in a broad discussion about the investment.

Those numbers were one of the first big dramatic moments in the trial:

Epic will likely call him to the stand today.

In September, Epic had simply proposed a “permissive” jury instruction: “that the jury may, if it chooses, infer that the evidence Google destroyed would have been harmful to Google’s case and helpful to Plaintiffs’ cases.”

But Judge Donato is not 100 percent sure what good the mandatory instruction will do.

“Sometimes they just make mistakes,” Walker says of Google’s business employees. “They think of the word privileged as similar to confidential, but we try to catch that during the discovery process.”

“We produce more documents than any company I can think of,” he says.

Judge Donato is not happy. Google tried to point out the passage Epic didn’t, but the judge cut Google short.

Donato says Google should have made employees live up to the company’s obligations and “ensure employees that were having communications substantive to a case not be given undue discretion not to preserve them.”