# Uber **Uber** is the ride-hailing company co-founded in 2009 by [[Travis Kalanick]] whose growth playbook — enter a city, ignore its taxi law, build a rider base faster than regulators can act, then negotiate from strength — became the template for the tech right's theory of government as an obstacle to be outrun. Its labor model (drivers as contractors), its capital structure (the largest checks from [[SoftBank]] and [[Saudi Arabia]]'s Public Investment Fund) and its 2017 boardroom coup, in which Kalanick was forced out after a year of scandals and replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi, are each a chapter in the vault's account of how the Valley's founders learned what they believe about power. ## The people it produced - **[[Travis Kalanick]]** — ousted 2017, back in 2026 at the head of Atoms, an industrial-software company that raised $1.7 billion led by [[Andreessen Horowitz]] with $100 million from Uber itself; [[Ben Horowitz]] said Uber's meritocracy was "diluted when Kalanick left." Kalanick and Khosrowshahi discussed acquiring Pony.ai's American arm at the May 2025 U.S.–Saudi summit in Riyadh; the talks failed. They remain in regular contact. - **[[Anthony Levandowski]]** — Uber's self-driving chief until the Waymo trade-secrets case cost the company about $350 million; pardoned by Trump in January 2021; since March 2026 running robotaxi development at Atoms after it bought his startup Pronto. - **[[Emil Michael]]** — Kalanick's chief business officer, now the Pentagon's Under Secretary for Research and Engineering, the clearest personnel link between Uber's culture and the second administration's defense-tech program. ## The robotaxi turn Uber's second decade is a bet that it can be the marketplace for other people's autonomous cars. Its partners span the geopolitical line: Waymo in the United States, and China's Pony.ai abroad — a May 2025 deal for international markets, Europe's first commercial robotaxi service in Zagreb with the Croatian firm Verne, and on **August 13, 2026** an expansion to more than 2,000 Pony.ai robotaxis across four more European cities and the Middle East. American restrictions on Chinese connected-vehicle software keep that fleet out of the home market, which is why the domestic story is Waymo and [[Tesla]] and the foreign story is Chinese. ## Why it matters here Uber is where "move fast and break things" met municipal law and won, and the lesson its alumni drew — that regulation is a negotiating position — is now applied to the federal government by people who learned it there. See [[Silicon Valley]] and the [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] for the doctrine, and [[Emil Michael]] for the appointment. ## See Also - [[Travis Kalanick]] · [[Emil Michael]] · [[Anthony Levandowski]] · [[Andreessen Horowitz]] · [[Ben Horowitz]] - [[SoftBank]] · [[Saudi Arabia]] · [[Tesla]] · [[Silicon Valley]]