Uber's Travis Kalanick Is A Serial Abuser Of Legal And Ethical Boundaries

The New York Times' profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick only confirms all the worst about the company and its leader. Driven by an insatiable desire to "win", Kalanick will do virtually anything to achieve his goals, disregarding any legal, ethical, or moral boundaries. While the Times article is definitely hard-hitting, they certainly soften their words somewhat in describing someone who could be called a serial criminal.

Kalanick's first venture, Scour, was a peer-to-peer network a la Napster that let users share digital files, much of which were copyrighted songs and videos. Like Napster, Scour was essentially sued into oblivion for copyright infringement. But Kalanick avoided the $250 billion copyright suit by simply having the company file for bankruptcy.

From there, Kalanick moved on to Red Swoosh, which focused on the transfer of large files, this time legally. However, when Red Swoosh struggled, Kalanick used tax dollars from employee paychecks to keep the company going, yet another flagrant violation of the law. Kalanick was saved from bankruptcy this time by investors who paid back the IRS and kept the operation afloat. In the end, Kalanick was able to sell Red Swoosh for $19 million, setting himself up for his next adventure. Two companies with two clearly illegal acts had made Kalanick a multi-millionaire and he took that lesson to heart.

When UberCab started up in 2010, Kalanick made it very clear that the enemy was the taxi business and he was going to defeat it by any means possible. The company had to change its name in in 2010 to simply Uber because it was marketing itself as a taxi service in San Francisco without the proper licenses and permits. This refusal to abide by local laws requiring the licensing and permitting of taxi companies would follow Uber into virtually every market it entered.

Uber's overarching theme was growth and that led to a workplace culture that Kalanick fostered that meant virtually anything goes as long as you are growing the company. The "culture" led to rampant sexual harassment and intimidation at the company and a well documented trail of illegal and unethical activity in cities and countries around the world.

The Times' biggest revelation is that Uber would still track users even after they had deleted the app from their iPhone.  In response to massive fraud in China where drivers would create accounts on stolen iPhones and use the app to both hail and serve the same non-existent ride, Uber created a digital fingerprint on every iPhone where its app was installed that would remain even if the iPhone had been erased or the app was deleted. Unfortunately, that was in violation of Apple's privacy policies. So, Kalanick had the fingerprint obscured whenever someone from Apple's headquarters in Cupertino would look at the Uber app's code, essentially making the fingerprinting "blind" to only Apple. Of course, Apple eventually caught on and Kalanick was forced to remove the fingerprinting from the Uber app.

The Times story describes a man who has had serious legal and ethical problems at all three companies he has been involved in. Yet he is still described as an entrepreneur and leads the sixth largest internet company in terms of revenue in the world. What more can that say about the state of capitalism in America and the world these days.