A leak of confidential files has revealed the internal history of how tech giant Uber misunderstood the laws, tricked the police, exploited violence against drivers and put secret pressure on governments during its aggressive global expansion.
The Guardian’s unprecedented leak of more than 124,000 documents, known as Uber files, exposes the ethically questionable practices that drove the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s most famous exports.
The leak spans a five-year period in which Uber was run by its co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to force taxi service to cities around the world, even if that meant breaking laws and regulations. of taxis.
During the fierce global reaction, the data shows how Uber tried to bolster support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.
French taxi drivers are protesting against private rental services like Uber. Photography: Olivier Coret / Rex / Shutterstock
The leaked messages suggest that Uber executives had no illusions at the same time about breaching the company’s law, with one executive joking that they had become “pirates” and another acknowledging: ” We’re just illegal. “
The file cache, which spans 2013-2017, includes more than 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages, including often candid, unvarnished communications between Kalanick and his top executive team.
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What are Uber files?
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Uber’s files are a global investigation based on a fund of 124,000 documents that were leaked to The Guardian. The data consists of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges among the Silicon Valley giant’s top executives, as well as notes, presentations, notebooks, informational documents and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and span from 2013 to 2017, the period in which Uber aggressively expanded around the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, tricked police and regulators, exploited violence against drivers and put secret pressure on governments around the world.
To facilitate a global investigation in the public interest, The Guardian shared data with 180 journalists from 29 countries through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and directed by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: “We have not apologized or will make excuses for past behaviors that clearly do not agree with our current values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us for what we have done over the past five years. and what we will do in the coming years “.
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In an exchange, Kalanick dismissed the concern of other executives that sending Uber drivers to a protest in France put them at risk of violence by angry opponents in the taxi industry. “I think it’s worth it,” he replied. “Guarantee of violence[s] success.”
In a statement, Kalanick’s spokesman said he “never suggested that Uber take advantage of the violence at the expense of driver safety” and any suggestion that he was involved in the 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 direct and frequent access to him and his staff.
Macron, the French president, appears to have made an extraordinary effort to help Uber, even telling the company he had negotiated a secret “deal” with his opponents in the French cabinet.
In private, Uber executives expressed a disguise barely disguised towards other elected officials who were less receptive to the company’s business model.
After German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who was mayor of Hamburg at the time, backed down from pressure groups at Uber and insisted on paying a minimum wage to drivers, an executive told his colleagues that it was “a real comic “.
When then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, a supporter of Uber at the time, arrived late for a meeting with the company at the Davos World Economic Forum, Kalanick sent a text message to a colleague: “I have that my people let him know that every minute he arrives is one minute less than he will have with me. “
After meeting with Kalanick, Biden seems to have modified his prepared speech in Davos to refer to a CEO whose company would give millions of workers “freedom to work as many hours as they want, managing their own lives as they wish “.
The Guardian led a global investigation into the leaked Uber files, sharing the data with media organizations around the world through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). More than 180 journalists from 40 media outlets, including Le Monde, the Washington Post and the BBC, will publish a series of investigative reports on the technology giant in the coming days.
In a statement responding to the leak, Uber admitted “mistakes and missteps,” but said it had been transformed since 2017 under the leadership of its current CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi.
“We have not found and will not give excuses for past behaviors that are clearly not in line with our current values,” he said. “Instead, we ask the public to judge us for what we’ve done over the last five years and what we’ll do in the next few years.”
Kalanick’s spokesman said Uber’s expansion initiatives were “led by more than a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct supervision and with the full approval of the Uber’s strong legal, policy and compliance groups. “
“Embrace chaos”
The leaked documents draw the curtains away from the methods Uber used to lay the foundations of its empire. One of the largest work platforms in the world, Uber is now a $ 43 billion (£ 36 billion) company that makes approximately 19 million trips a day.
The files cover Uber’s operations in 40 countries during a period when the company became a global giant, sweeping its taxi transportation service to many of the cities where it still operates today.
An Uber car to Moscow. Photography: Fifg / Alamy
From Moscow to Johannesburg, funded with unprecedented venture capital funding, Uber heavily subsidized travel, seducing drivers and passengers to the app with incentives and pricing models that would not be sustainable.
Uber undermined established taxi and taxi markets and pressured governments to rewrite laws to help pave the way for an application-based work and concert economy model that has since proliferated around the world.
In an attempt to stifle the fierce backlash against the company and win changes to labor and taxi laws, Uber planned to spend an extraordinary $ 90 million in 2016 on lobbying and public relations, a document suggests.
His strategy often involved passing over city mayors and transportation authorities and directly to the seat of power.
In addition to meeting with Biden in Davos, Uber executives met face-to-face with Macron, Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and George Osborne, the UK Chancellor. in that moment. A note from the meeting portrayed Osborne as a “strong advocate.”
In a statement, Osborne said the government’s explicit policy at the time was to meet with global technology companies and “persuade them to invest in Britain and create jobs here”.
Although the Davos meeting with Osborne was declared, the data reveals that six ministers in the UK Conservative cabinet had meetings with Uber that were not disclosed. It is unclear whether the meetings should have been declared, which exposes confusion over how UK lobbying rules apply.
Taxis block Whitehall during protest against Uber’s decision to grant a license to operate in London in 2016. Photo: Andy Rain / EPA
The documents indicate that Uber was able to find unofficial routes to power, apply influence through friends or intermediaries, or seek encounters with politicians in which helpers and officials were not present.
He had the support of powerful figures in places such as Russia, Italy and Germany, offering them valuable financial holdings in the startup and turning them into “strategic investors”.
And in an attempt to shape political debates, it paid prominent academics hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce research that backed the company’s claims about the benefits of its economic model.
Despite a well-funded and stubborn lobbying operation, Uber’s efforts had mixed results. In some places, Uber managed to convince governments to rewrite the laws, with lasting effects. But elsewhere, the company found itself blocked by entrenched taxi industries, overwhelmed in arms by local taxi transport rivals or opposed by left-wing politicians who simply refused to give in.
A protester holds a flare during a protest in Paris against Uber. Photography: François Mori / AP
When it faced opposition, Uber tried to take advantage of it, taking advantage of it to feed the narrative that its technology was altering old transportation systems and urging governments to reform its laws.
When Uber launched in India, Kalanick’s top executive in Asia urged executives to focus on boosting growth, even when “fires start to burn”. “You know this is a normal part of Uber’s business,” he said. “Embrace chaos. It means you’re doing something meaningful.”
Kalanick appeared to put this ethos into practice in January 2016, when Uber’s attempts to turn markets around in Europe sparked angry protests in Belgium, Spain, Italy and France from taxi drivers who feared for their livelihoods.
Amidst taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a mass civil disobedience counter-protest.
He warned that doing so risks putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks by “far-right thugs” who had infiltrated taxi protests and were “damaged by a fight.” it looked like Kalanick was urging his team to move on, regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Guarantee of violence[s] success. And these guys have to resist, right? OK in the right place …