A leaked trove of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how the tech giant Uber flouted laws, duped police, exploited violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments during its aggressive global expansion.
The Guardian led a global investigation into the leaked Uber files, sharing the data with media organisations around the world via the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). More than 180 journalists at 40 media outlets including Le Monde, Washington Post and the BBC will in the coming days publish a series of investigative reports about the tech giant.
The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents known as the Uber files lays bare the ethically questionable practices that fuelled the companys transformation into one of Silicon Valleys most famous exports.
The leak spans a five-year period when Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force the cab-hailing service into cities around the world, even if that meant breaching laws and taxi regulations.
During the fierce global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to shore up support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.
Leaked messages suggest Uber executives were at the same time under no illusions about the companys law-breaking, with one executive joking they had become pirates and another conceding: Were just fucking illegal.
The cache of files, which span 2013 to 2017, includes more than 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages, including often frank and unvarnished communications between Kalanick and his top team of executives.
In one exchange, Kalanick dismissed concerns from other executives that sending Uber drivers to a protest in France put them at risk of violence from angry opponents in the taxi industry. I think its worth it, he shot back. Violence guarantee[s] success.
In a statement, Kalanicks spokesperson said he never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety and any suggestion he was involved in such activity would be completely false. The leak also contains texts between Kalanick and Emmanuel Macron, who secretly helped the company in France when he was economy minister, allowing Uber frequent and direct access to him and his staff. Macron, the French president, appears to have gone to extraordinary lengths to help Uber, even telling the company he had brokered a secret deal with its opponents in the French cabinet. Privately, Uber executives expressed barely disguised disdain for other elected officials who were who were less receptive to the companys business model.
When the then US vice-president, Joe Biden, a supporter of Uber at the time, was late to a meeting with the company at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Kalanick texted a colleague: Ive had my people let him know that every minute late he is, is one less minute he will have with me.
After meeting Kalanick, Biden appears to have amended his prepared speech at Davos to refer to a CEO whose company would give millions of workers freedom to work as many hours as they wish, manage their own lives as they wish.
Uber undercut established taxi and cab markets and put pressure on governments to rewrite laws to help pave the way for an app-based, gig-economy model of work that has since proliferated across the world.
Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience. Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from extreme right thugs who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were spoiling for a fight, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. I think its worth it, he said. Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.
The decision to send Uber drivers into potentially volatile protests, despite the risks, was consistent with what one senior former executive told the Guardian was a strategy of weaponising drivers, and exploiting violence against them to keep the controversy burning. In a bid to quell the fierce backlash against the company and win changes to taxi and labour laws, Uber planned to spend an extraordinary $90m in 2016 on lobbying and public relations, one document suggests.
Wow, so now Uber isn't just shit to its worker base, they're also a fucking sinister shadow entity behind the curtains too...
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At the same time, also fuck the goddamn Taxi companies. Uber is good in theory, and I don't care how they had to lobby to make THAT happen; it doesn't excuse how they treat their workers, however, or how much they take off the top for doing basically nothing besides running a gps app.