Uber, But For Melt Downs

Sexual harassment, corporate-espionage charges, taking advantage of drivers: The company that practically courts bad PR has an even greater, more existential dilemma.

- Reeves Wiedeman

In early March, Travis Kalanick, the 40-year-old CEO of Uber, was riding in an SUV to Palo Alto for the company’s Technology Day, thinking about how to help Uber survive one of the worst periods a corporation had ever experienced. In January, some 500,000 users had joined a campaign to #DeleteUber from their phones, in response to the company’s perceived lack of support for protests at JFK against the Trump administration’s immigration ban (Kalanick had recently joined Trump’s economic council), which seemed to underscore the long-standing view that Uber didn’t care much for its drivers. The deletions were still coming three weeks later when Susan Fowler, a female engineer who’d left the company, accused it of rampant sexism and sexual harassment. Then, over the next two weeks, Google sued Uber, alleging it had stolen the company’s self-driving-car technology; a video surfaced of Kalanick getting into a profane argument with a driver; and the New York Times revealed that Uber had moved into cities where it was not allowed to operate with the help of a tool called Greyball. (The program showed government officials a fake version of Uber’s app with “ghost cars” so its drivers couldn’t be apprehended.)