Uber CEO walks back comment on Saudi writer’s slaying
NEW YORK—Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is being criticized for calling the murder of a Washington Post columnist “a mistake” and comparing it to the death of a pedestrian struck by one of the company’s autonomous vehicles. Khosrowshahi later said he regretted his comments, made during an interview with Axios on HBO. He tweeted Monday that there’s no forgiving or forgetting what happened to the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and he was wrong to call it a mistake.
Critics say Khosrowshahi is downplaying Khashoggi’s grisly murder to placate one of the company’s biggest investors. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, known as The Public Investment Fund, holds about $1.9 billion worth of Uber stock, making it the company’s fifth-largest stakeholder. Its managing director, Yasir Al-Rumayyan, sits on Uber’s board.
Officials with the US and the United Nations suspect that Saudi Arabia’s Prince Mohammed bin Salman played a role in Khashoggi’s slaying. Prince Mohammed has said he takes full responsibility but denied ordering the killing, calling the slaying “a mistake” in an interview in September.
In an interview with Axios which aired on Sunday, Khosrowshahi echoed those comments, saying “I think that the government said that they made a mistake.” He then compared Khashoggi’s slaying to an accident in which one of Uber’s autonomous vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian last year in Arizona.
“It’s a serious mistake. We’ve made mistakes too, with self-driving, and we stopped driving and we’re recovering from that mistake,” Khosrowshahi said. “So I think that people make mistakes, it doesn’t mean that they can never be forgiven. I think they’ve taken it seriously.”
Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by Saudi intelligence officials and a forensic doctor last year at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. He was a longtime editor at state-linked newspapers in Saudi Arabia and had been in selfimposed exile in the US while writing critically about Saudi leadership.
A UN investigator said the Saudi journalist was the victim of “a planned, organized, well-resourced and premeditated extrajudicial killing for which the state of Saudi Arabia must bear responsibility.”
In his Monday tweet, Khosrowshahi said he told Axios after the interview “I said something in the moment I don’t believe. Our investors have long known my views here & I’m sorry I wasn’t as clear on Axios.”
Nonetheless, #BoycottUber began to trend Monday on Twitter, recalling the #DeleteUber movement that gathered steam years ago as the company struggled with image problems and lost customers to rival Lyft.
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ED UY
BEING in Bali to cover the Veritas Vision Solution Day conference this week might have saved my wallet from the pre-holiday budget catastrophe that was the 11.11 sale, but I definitely couldn’t escape the massive propaganda that came with it.
Besides the numerous e-mails from brands, my social-media feed was flooded with all sorts of 11.11 promotions, from shared blogger posts, to Manny Pacquiao popping up and shouting, “Shopee Free Shipping” in the middle of my “Tulfo and Chill” YouTube sessions, and even the heart bait posts of my favorite “bikinifluencers” on Instagram had 11.11-sponsored content. Is there nothing sacred anymore?
Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate online shopping, and thankfully I can still resist the temptation of making “add to cart” a nightly habit.
But this year’s 11.11 was something else.
SHOPPING, THE BEST THERAPY
FOR SINGLES?
ALSO known as Singles Day or the biggest shopping holiday in China, its record sales made Black Friday look like a church bazaar as noted by one article. In terms of money spent, the one-day festival of consumption eclipsed Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cyber Monday—combined.
Singles Day, or Guanggun Jie, is a shopping holiday popular among young Chinese people that began as a celebration of pride for being single. The date, November 11 (11/11), was chosen because the No. “1” resembles an individual who is alone.
Quick research revealed that it actually originated at Nanjing University in 1993. One origin story is that four male students from a dorm thought of a way to break away from the monotony of being single and agreed that November 11 would be a day of events and celebrations in honor of being single. The activities spread through the university and eventually made their way to wider society.
Today, the holiday has evolved into a massive one-day shopping event thanks to the deft tactics of Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba. In 2009, the retailer realized Singles Day could be an opportunity to profit from single consumers by providing an occasion to shop for themselves.
“Singles Day” may sound lonely, but definitely not for the 200,000 brands that join the sale or the millions of people who find happiness by spending money to buy lots of stuff just because its on “sale.”
Even with the US-China trade tensions, western