Interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi about Prop 22, capitalism, Travis Kalanick, getting nearly killed while delivering for Uber Eats on a bike in SF, more
everything from Prop 22 to the nature of capitalism to World of Warcraft to Travis Kalanick and Travis Bickle — from his waterfront property on Whidbey Island. https://www.nytimes.com/... Sar Haribhakti / @sarthakgh : Galloway is at it again. Of course NYT keeps asking him for comment First of all, its a sexist comment. She is 1000x more successful than the professional critic class he is a poster child of. Secondly, time to buy Uber https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/... Sara Ashley O'Brien / @saraashleyo : “our system doesn't work for a certain percentage of drivers who can't figure it out, who can't understand how to make it work ... we have to build better safeguards for people who can't make our system quite work the way that they want to work” https://www.nytimes.com/... Taylor Lorenz / @taylorlorenz : “Our system is called capitalism. It's designed to optimize for long-term growth of capital. When people wonder, ‘Well, are capital owners advantaged over labor?,’ it ain't called laborism.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
New York TimesMaureen Dowd
Context & Ripple Effects
Four years into replacing Travis Kalanick — whose dashcam lecture to a broke driver crystallized Uber's culture problem, and whose ouster the Financial Times framed as the board trading relentless innovation for stability — Dara Khosrowshahi sits for a wide-ranging New York Times interview touching Prop 22, capitalism, and his predecessor by name. His own near-miss delivering for Uber Eats by bike in San Francisco gives the capital-versus-labor talk a firsthand anchor.
Timing matters: in April, Uber conceded that its California driver price-naming and destination-preview policies had hurt the business and floated scrapping them, so the interview lands mid-retreat from pro-driver features in the very state where Prop 22 was won. Sara Ashley O'Brien's pull-quote — the system "doesn't work" for a certain percentage of drivers — frames exactly the tension Dara is being pressed to resolve.
First-order effects
Dara publicly stakes out the Prop 22 side of the classification debate just as Uber weighs unwinding its California price-naming and destination-preview pilots, signaling the company values contractor flexibility over those driver-friendly features.
The Kalanick passages reopen the founder-era file: set against the 2017 dashcam episode and the governance-failure diagnosis, the delivery anecdote doubles as reputation management for both Dara personally and the contractor model — with Twitter reaction (Sar Haribhakti calling a critic's comment sexist and urging followers to buy Uber stock) showing the interview moving sentiment in real time.
Second-order effects
Lyft faces a rival converting CEO-level driver-experience storytelling into competitive advantage — a lever Uber later pulled directly with the app revamp behind its US share climb from 62% to 74%.
Labor advocates and California policymakers gain a citable chief-executive admission — that the current system fails some drivers — usable on either side of the next classification fight, whatever Dara intended by it.
Third-order effects
If interviews like this become routine, the gig-platform CEO settles in as a standing participant in labor regulation, with Prop 22-style carve-outs hardening into the industry's structural cost advantage — contested state by state.
The operator-over-founder governance settlement holds: the fear that Uber's board traded innovation for stability gives way to a durable professional-CEO model, with the Kalanick era fixed as the cautionary baseline rather than the aspiration.
The trend: Consumer-platform CEOs are becoming the public negotiators of the capital-versus-labor bargain their businesses run on, with California's Prop 22 as the template under continuous contest.
Great profile of @dkhos at @Uber. I'm proud of my cousin and can't wait to see what the future holds for the company. More importantly, this profile gives a deeper look into Dara's values as a son, husband, and father. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Find yourself a fierce, competitive boss who, even though you're making him gobs of money, will actively help you get a job somewhere else https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“This is not a quirky man with an interesting backstory, this is the CEO of a company that has never earned a profit, changed its PR pitch a dozen times, sold off most of its value proposition to investors, and waging an international lobbying campaign to change labor laws.” http…
Dowd opens a profile of Uber's CEO with a stilted scene of eating steak together - a strange echo of Friedman's late-night lamb snack with MBS. Is there some NYT-style guide which suggests writers use meat-eating-scenes-to humanize profile subjects? https://www.nytimes.com/...
I think this is probably one of the worst interviews of Dara I've ever read, primarily because this reads like a regression to how Uber was talked about when most of the media was drinking the Kool-Aid https://www.nytimes.com/...
I'm begging you to just hire a labor reporter instead of getting columnists to write garbage profiles revering a CEO of a deeply exploitative company https://www.nytimes.com/...
I would pay to have seen Maureen Dowd use words like “proclivities” and “operatic characters” while talking with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's kids. https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Let's stop giving this man airtime “Scott Galloway, a professor of marketing at New York University's Stern School of Business, compares the Uber chief to Sheryl Sandberg, “the pretty face” that obscures the damage their firms are doing to society.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
I guess we are at the point where these people feel comfortable being this open about what they and capitalism is. These people are dangerous authoritarians. https://twitter.com/...
“Our system doesn't work for a certain percentage of drivers who can't figure it out, who can't understand how to make it work.” Uber CEO blames drivers for them underpaying drivers and not covering cost of car, sick leave, healthcare, etc. https://www.nytimes.com/...
My interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. We cover the waterfront — everything from Prop 22 to the nature of capitalism to World of Warcraft to Travis Kalanick and Travis Bickle — from his waterfront property on Whidbey Island. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Galloway is at it again. Of course NYT keeps asking him for comment First of all, its a sexist comment. She is 1000x more successful than the professional critic class he is a poster child of. Secondly, time to buy Uber https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
“our system doesn't work for a certain percentage of drivers who can't figure it out, who can't understand how to make it work ... we have to build better safeguards for people who can't make our system quite work the way that they want to work” https://www.nytimes.com/...
“Our system is called capitalism. It's designed to optimize for long-term growth of capital. When people wonder, ‘Well, are capital owners advantaged over labor?,’ it ain't called laborism.” https://www.nytimes.com/...