When I began working for Uber in 2014, many parts of the job were unusual. One day we were assigned burner phones with fake names, so that we could order Lyfts, learn about how the Lyft drivers were paid, and ultimately convert drivers from Lyft to Uber. Next we were taught how to track the trips of literally anyone with an account, just by searching their cell phone number in a database. The idea here was to allow crisis communications staff to figure out what happened during a trip that may have gone awry; but for a long time, there were no guardrails on that database. One could, like a police officer stalking Flock camera feeds, view the whereabouts of an ex-partner simply by typing in a phone number.
If all of that weren’t strange enough, there was also a very specific and niche ethos that appeared to unite almost everyone in using burner phones and searching databases of riders. That was a deep hatred for the taxi industry.
Now, I can understand that some people don’t particularly like taxis—that they could plausibly find them less accountable, less accessible, or less comfortable. That’s a totally valid consumer preference.
I can also recognize, on a psychological level, that my coworkers probably had to adopt this sort of viciousness against something, in order to feel like they were fighting for something. Forcing Uber into being was a blunt task. And I think for a lot of people, the motivating mission couldn’t just be money, or allowing people to roll like a potato from their beds into a car. There had to be some kind of world-improving reason for the change, at least in their own minds.
But none of this ever warranted, in my opinion, making hatred of the taxi industry the kernel of one’s identity. It seemed like a strange hill to die on.
Well, it turns out that in 2026, it is no longer a hill to die on. Rather unsurprisingly, Uber and its people may not hate taxis so much—especially when it is explicitly in their interest not to.
In these times, Uber—recognizing that their autonomous vehicle production is behind, and that Waymo is eating up their ridesharing and delivery market share as a result—is now joining forces with the taxi drivers. In a wild about-face, Uber is partnering with unions to advance multiple bills in places like New Jersey, which would mandate a certain number of human drivers on the streets alongside autonomous drivers. From a recent piece in the Financial Times:
The ride-hailing group that became notorious in its early years for skirting regulation and aggressively lobbying against worker protections has recently joined unions in pushing to limit the rollout of self-driving taxis in locations such as New Jersey and Washington DC.
Across the US, Uber has argued for a slower deployment of autonomous vehicles to ease the transition for drivers — and pushed for rules requiring ride-hailing platforms to have “hybrid networks” that combine self-driving cars with human drivers.
As part of this “hybrid network” push, Uber is really on the offensive; putting out statements admitting to the “irony” of it all, and even pushing reports that warn of driver wage depression without a hybrid human-AV set-up.
I probably don’t need to tell this group of readers that driver wages are not actually what Uber cares about. Case in point: while Uber is putting out reports about helping drivers earn more, they also pitched out this story last week: Uber beats Waymo to launch robotaxis in London. The first line of the piece is: “Uber beat out Waymo in launching a commercial robotaxi service in London, the city’s first.”
The dissonance is not going unnoticed. Last week, I came across a post written by Alison Taylor, a Professor of Corporate Ethics at NYU Stern School of Business. Taylor outlines the problems with Uber’s strategy from a reputational standpoint: “One is the public, who increasingly hate corporate hypocrisy and flip flopping more than anyone else. A bigger one is a huge history of mistrust, which makes cooperation with unions difficult.”
I agree with Taylor that the company is making a messaging mistake in pretending to care, especially with customers and partners. Taylor also commented on the business and labor strategy: “How many other businesses are going to belatedly realize workers are important, and start backing out of their current ‘strategies’?”
On that point, I do agree that there will be a course correction to hire human workers when corporations realize they have automated too far. But it is equally true that Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is under pressure to automate the fleet quickly.
Just last week, the company laid off 10% of its workforce and mandated a return-to-office for 99% of their employees, claiming that this makes their operations “simpler and faster.” All efficiency jargon aside, their singular goal, of course, with all of these initiatives, is to maximize shareholder profit (Uber’s shares went up 2% after employees were laid off.) While Uber lays off staff and makes mid-term plans to partner with the taxi industry, it seems that in reality, the company is buying time to catch up with Waymo.
I find it important to understand who the people are behind these strategies, and what is motivating them (I suppose, no longer a hatred of taxis). As has been documented extensively, the company has worked for years to “mature” following the removal of its mercurial founder Travis Kalanick. That initiative has been steered, in large part, by a fixer named Jill Hazelbaker.
Hazelbaker, who currently has the title of President and Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Uber, worked for John McCain, Google, and Snapchat before joining Uber. For a time, she worked under former Uber, Google, and Netflix comms boss Rachel Whetstone; Whetstone then left and Hazelbaker took over. (It’s worth noting that Whetstone’s husband is seeking political office, drawing very recent comparisons to Donald Trump. I recall sitting at a dinner with Whetstone once where she cackled about drivers in India protesting fare cuts, by carrying the corpse of a driver who took his own life to the Uber offices.)
I never saw Hazelbaker cackle in such an explicit manner (though, under the guise of offering me a job at Snapchat, she did fly me to Venice Beach in 2015, proceeded to ask me probing questions about Uber’s org chart, and subsequently joined Uber to lead the team the next month while pretending not to know me.)
In any case, while Uber has had less public relations crises under Hazelbaker than in the past, it can only hide behind a facade of “maturation” or civility for so long. Especially when the actual core of its ethos may not actually be disdain for taxis, but more predictable corporators motivators: self-interest, survival-of-the-fittest, and the need to maximize shareholder value and executive compensation.
Some of that true ethos bubbled to the fore in this New York Times report documenting how Uber fights sexual assault lawsuits. In one deposition, an Uber lawyer demanded to know what a rape victim was wearing the night of her assault, asking whether she ever felt “abandoned by her father or degraded by her mother.” The vile tactics of victim-blaming aside, such a lawyer and line of questioning reminds me of what a corporation will actually stoop to to “win” at literally all costs.
While conducting some research for this piece, I happened to see that Uber’s former head of public policy is now the head of global public policy at Waymo—presumably now fighting a government relations war against some of his former Uber colleagues, who have now banded together with their prior enemy, the taxi industry.
Amid this tangled web of allies and enemies, it may all feel disturbingly fluid, and it all may feel like a game meant to benefit a few people. But it’s also a game in which real people can become collateral damage. In this next phase of Uber, a dark side they may have once masked in the pursuit of “maturity” is now becoming more brazen. We’ll see how customers and regulators respond.
What else we’re paying attention to this week…
The reviews are in for Alex Gibney’s scathing documentary about Elon Musk: “The film depicts the world’s richest man as petty, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, cruel, detached from humans at a personal level (including various ex-partners and many of his children) while purporting to want to save humanity by colonizing Mars. A real prince. Musk, in my view, gives Elon the takedown he richly deserves.”
People in Kenya made money ghostwriting college essays and other homework for lazy high school students. When AI arrived, the cottage industry went bust.
A campaign to support the Ellison-Paramount merger is literally putting words of support for the merger in writers’ mouths.
Data center “enthusiasts” and proponents are leveraging an abstract fear about China winning the AI race to push for more centers.
A delightful piece of news, for a change: after getting laid off from a tech startup three years ago, a woman and her partner opened the first Indonesian coffee shop in Silicon Valley.