David Richter, who joined Uber in January 2014, replaces Emil Michael as Uber's SVP for business, having previously served as VP of strategic initiatives
Johana Bhuiyan / Recode :
Context & Ripple Effects
Emil Michael's exit closes the chapter on the most aggressive dealmaking era of Uber's business side, and his own telling of it is pointed: he attributes the ouster not to the company's scandals but to what he saw as a weak board and lax legal team, plus his close friendship with Travis Kalanick. The replacement is an internal promotion — David Richter, who joined Uber in January 2014 and built his record as VP of strategic initiatives before stepping into the SVP for business role.
The choice signals continuity through turbulence rather than a clean break: Richter is a Kalanick-era hire inheriting Michael's portfolio mid-crisis, which makes his durability the open question the follow-up coverage answers.
First-order effects
- Richter takes over the full business remit Michael ran — partnerships and deal strategy — while Michael leaves Uber entirely after years as one of Kalanick's closest lieutenants.
Second-order effects
- Richter's tenure proves short: within roughly a year he is out, with Asia and Latin America chief Andrew Macdonald absorbing parts of the partnerships chief role as it is redistributed rather than refilled.
- Michael's seat does not stay cold long on the market — scooter rival Lime hires him within eighteen months to run M&A and sales strategy and serve as interim CFO, showing ex-Uber business chiefs carry immediate value to competitors.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, Uber's 2017 governance crisis functions as a talent distribution event: Kalanick-era executives disperse across the industry (Richter to Lime, Michael later resurfacing in the Pentagon's dispute with Anthropic per the Bloomberg profile), spreading dealmaker DNA beyond one company.
- Internally, the repeated reshuffling of the same portfolios — Richter's old strategic-finance-adjacent lane echoing forward in Uber's later promotion of Balaji Krishnamurthy to CFO — points toward a structure where business and finance leadership rotate through a small bench rather than staying with long-tenured individuals.
The trend: Uber's 2017 leadership crisis began converting its Kalanick-era executive corps into industry-wide talent exports, with each departure redistributing dealmaking capacity to rivals and new sectors.