Google paid its autonomous car experts so much money to the point that some of them resigned after becoming instant multi-millionaires. A report revealed that Google invested too much in keeping their first workers for self-driving cars but achieved the opposite effect instead.

Bloomberg said that when Google pioneered the industry, it offered an unusual pay scheme based on project value and performance. Apart from the standard salary, workers reaped off bonuses and even business equity. In the end, one employee got away with 16-multipliers in just 4 years of being with the project. Majority of others breached million dollar figures.

Bloomberg also claimed that they talked to two high-ranking workers and their initial reaction was to laugh out loud while calling the pay scheme "f**k you money." The employees described their unusual experience where Google got too excited each time there is a major milestone in the project and poured them with more money.

Instead of thinking that the work is very lucrative, some did the opposite and left after having huge capital to start a business of their own. The mother company Alphabet indeed became a frontrunner in the autonomous car industry but allegedly lost $3.5 billion in betting on manpower. To make things worst, Tech Spot views that it is going to take few more years before self-driving cars hit the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg traced some of the early workers for Google's autonomous car business. Former project head Chris Urmson tagged another expert from Tesla, Sterling Anderson and co-funded a startup. Former Google director for hardware development Bryan Salesky left in 2016 to form Argo AI. Some employees formed their own self-driving truck Otto and sold the design to Uber.

In the end, Google learned its lesson and morphed the business model into a standalone firm known now as Waymo. All employees are treated the same and a standardized, uniform pay scale was introduced.