Uber: trouble on all fronts for the ride-hailing giant

In just eight years, Uber’s “unrelentingly ambitious” founder, Travis Kalanick, has built the taxi-app company into “America’s largest privately owned technology firm”, worth an estimated $70bn, said The Economist. But Uber is now “going through the biggest crisis in its short history”. Several key executives have quit, citing worries about the firm’s macho culture. Worse, the steady drip of negative stories is having an impact on Uber’s market share, which has fallen from an estimated 80% of the US ride-hailing market in January, to 74% – partly due to the #Deleteuber campaign mounted in protest at its apparent support of Trump policies. Investors worry that Uber is looking so “bruised” that a “knockout blow” could permanently damage its “momentum”.

Uber has hired former US attorney general Eric Holder to investigate “explosive claims about widespread sexual harassment”, said The Sunday Times. But still the allegations keeping coming. The firm has “crashed into a fresh scandal” following reports that Kalanick and other managers visited “a karaoke escort bar” in South Korea during a 2014 business trip.

In Britain, “an increasingly unpleasant smell hangs over” Uber and its friends in high places, said the Daily Mail. In 2015, David Cameron and George Osborne are believed to have urged the then London mayor, Boris Johnson, to “kill off” plans to curtail the “tax-dodging” firm’s activities in the city – influenced, perhaps, by their “close personal links” to Rachel Whetstone, an Uber executive married to Cameron’s former strategy director, Steve Hilton. Since leaving office, Osborne has landed a £650,000 job with Blackrock, which has a £500m stake in Uber. Suspicions are mounting; a “full parliamentary inquiry” is clearly merited.