In early February, following US President Donald Trump’s executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, over 200,000 people in the US deleted their Uber accounts on the allegation that the taxi service had attempted to profit over a strike organised by taxi unions as a protest against the ban.
Around the same time, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was returning from the Super Bowl in an Uber taxi. In the video, put out on YouTube by Bloomberg on February 28, Kalanick got into an argument with his driver Fawzi Kame, after the latter complained about falling fares.
“You’re raising the standards, and you’re dropping the prices,” Kamel said. “People are not trusting you any more. I lost $97,000 because of you. I’m bankrupt because of you... You keep changing every day.”
After getting into a brief argument with the driver, Kalanick ended the conversation by saying: “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!” According to the Bloomberg report, Kalanick rated the driver with one star following the conversation.
After the video went viral, the CEO apologised for his statements in a note to his employees.
“To say that I am ashamed is an extreme understatement,” he wrote. “My job as your leader is to lead…and that starts with behaving in a way that makes us all proud. That is not what I did, and it cannot be explained away.”
The video comes alongside a spate of bad news for the company that include allegations of sexual harassment and a lawsuit by Google for supposedly stealing trade secrets and technology of self-driven cars.
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