SAN FRANCISCO — Michael Douglas' Academy Award-winning performance in “Wall Street” played a supporting role on the third day of the high-profile trade secrets trial between Waymo and Uber.

With former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on the stand for his second day of testimony, Charles Verhoeven of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan played the iconic “greed is good” speech that Douglas delivered while portraying the fictional corporate raider Gordon Gekko. The video came into evidence via text message Kalanick received in March 2016 from Anthony Levandowski, the former Google engineer at the heart of Waymo's trade secrets case.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California allowed Verhoeven to play the speech despite objections from Uber's lawyer, Karen Dunn of Boies Schiller Flexner, that it would be prejudicial.

“Even if [Kalanick] didn't look at it, Levandowski did and Levandowski is the guy who allegedly stole all the trade secrets,” Alsup said.

Levandowski sent Kalanick the YouTube clip of Douglas' speech while Uber was in negotiations to buy his startup company, Ottomotto. Wrote Levandowski: “Here's the speech you need to give ;-)”

Kalanick sat quietly drinking from a plastic water bottle as the clip played on screens in front of jurors and the packed gallery in Alsup's courtroom. After the clip finished, Verhoeven asked Kalanick if he clicked the link.

“I don't know. I think I would,” Kalanick said. “There's a winky face right there,” he added, pointing to the emoticon Levandowski included in the message.

“It's a famous speech,” said Verhoeven, obviously trying to draw a Gekko-to-Kalanick parallel for jurors.

“It's a movie. It's fake,” Kalanick said.

As entertaining and dramatic as the interlude was, it illustrated part of the difficulty Waymo has had in putting together its case with Levandowski so far asserting his Fifth Amendment right to not testify. Verhoeven's questioning showed that Kalanick was eager to hire Levandowski and move forward in the company's development of autonomous cars. Meeting notes have come into evidence, which claim Kalanick told underlings to go forward with the Ottomotto deal and have the company's legal department find ways to “minimize the pain.”

But under questioning from Boies Schiller's Dunn, the former CEO swore the Ottomotto acquisition had nothing to do with acquiring Google trade secrets.

“We hired Anthony because we felt he was an incredible visionary, a very good technologist, and he was also very charming,” Kalanick said. “Ultimately, self-driving is part of the future and Uber wants to be part of that future.”

Kalanick described how Google initially invested in Uber in 2013—with Google co-founder Larry Page showing up to meet him for a meeting that year in a self-driving car.

“From our perspective that was the relationship,” he said. “It was kind of like little brother with the big brother.”

However Kalanick testified the relationship soon grew strained after Uber began hearing rumors that Google might enter the ride-sharing market in 2014. When Uber started its own autonomous vehicle unit with researchers from Carnegie Mellon University the next year, Kalancik said that Google's Page “made if very clear” that he was “super unhappy. … Unpumped.”

Kalanick said Page told him that Uber was taking Google's IP.

“Your people are not your IP,” Kalanick said he told Page. “If you have an issue on IP, we have very clean processes to make sure that nobody that we hire from your company brings any of your stuff over.”