A leaked collection of confidential files has revealed the inside story of how tech giant Uber flouts laws, cheats police, uses violence against drivers and secretly lobbies governments during its aggressive global expansion.
The unprecedented leak to the Guardian of more than 124,000 documents – known as the Uber files – reveals the ethically dubious practices that fueled the company’s transformation into one of Silicon Valley’s best-known exports.
The leak spanned a five-year period when Uber was run by co-founder Travis Kalanick, who tried to bring the ride-hailing service to cities around the world by brute force, even if it meant breaking taxi laws and regulations.
Amid the fierce global backlash, the data shows how Uber tried to secure support by discreetly courting prime ministers, presidents, billionaires, oligarchs and media barons.
French taxi drivers are protesting against private car-hire services such as Uber. Photo: Olivier Coret/Rex/Shutterstock
Leaked reports suggested that Uber executives at the same time were under no illusions about the company’s breaking the law, with one executive joking that they had become “pirates” and another admitting: “We’re just fucking illegal.”
The cache of files, which spans 2013 to 2017, includes more than 83,000 emails, iMessages and WhatsApp messages, including often candid and unvarnished communications between Kalanick and his top executive team.
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What are Uber files?
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The Uber files are a global investigation based on a set of 124,000 documents leaked to the Guardian. The data consists of emails, iMessages and WhatsApp exchanges between the Silicon Valley giant’s top executives, as well as memos, presentations, notebooks, briefing documents and invoices.
The leaked records cover 40 countries and cover the period from 2013 to 2017, the period when Uber was aggressively expanding around the world. They reveal how the company broke the law, defrauded police and regulators, used violence against drivers and secretly lobbied governments around the world.
To facilitate a global public interest investigation, the Guardian shared the data with 180 journalists in 29 countries through the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The investigation was managed and led by the Guardian with the ICIJ.
In a statement, Uber said: “We have not and will not make excuses for past behavior that is clearly inconsistent with our current values. Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we have done in the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”
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In one exchange, Kalanick dismissed other executives’ concerns that sending Uber drivers to protest in France put them at risk of violence from angry opponents in the taxi industry. “I think it’s worth it,” he shot back. “Warranty for violence[s] Good luck.”
In a statement, Kalanick’s spokesperson said that he “never suggested that Uber should profit from violence at the expense of driver safety” and any suggestion that he engaged in such activity would be completely false.
The leak also contained texts between Kalanick and Emmanuel Macron, who secretly helped the company in France when he was economy minister, allowing Uber honest and direct access to him and his staff.
Macron, the French president, appears to have gone to extraordinary lengths to help Uber, even telling the company he had made a secret “deal” with its opponents in the French cabinet.
Privately, Uber executives expressed thinly veiled disdain for 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, defied Uber’s lobbyists and insisted drivers be paid minimum wages, an executive told colleagues he was a “real comedian.”
When then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, an Uber supporter at the time, was late for a meeting with the company at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Kalanick texted a colleague: “I had my people let him know that every minute he’s late, there is one minute less with me.
After meeting with Kalanick, Biden appeared to change his prepared speech at Davos to talk about a CEO whose company would give millions of workers “the freedom to work as many hours as they want, to run their lives as they want.” .
The Guardian is leading 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 in 40 media outlets, including Le Monde, the Washington Post and the BBC, will publish a series of investigative reports on the tech giant in the coming days.
In a statement responding to the leak, Uber acknowledged “mistakes and missteps” but said it had been transformed since 2017 under its current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi.
“We have not and will not make excuses for past behavior that is clearly inconsistent with our current values,” it said. “Instead, we’re asking the public to judge us by what we’ve done in the past five years and what we’re going to do in the years to come.”
Kalanick’s spokesman said Uber’s expansion initiatives are “led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct supervision and full approval of Uber’s robust legal, policy and compliance groups.”
“Embrace the Chaos”
The leaked documents pull back the curtains on the methods Uber used to lay the foundations of its empire. One of the world’s biggest ride-hailing platforms, Uber is now a $43 billion (£36 billion) company that makes an estimated 19 million trips a day.
The files cover Uber’s operations in 40 countries during a period in which the company became a global giant, bulldozing its taxi service into many of the cities where it still operates today.
Uber car in Moscow. Photo: Fifg/Alamy
From Moscow to Johannesburg, funded with unprecedented venture capital funding, Uber has heavily subsidized rides, luring 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 pave the way for an app-based, gig-economy work model that has since spread around the world.
In an effort to quell the backlash against the company and win changes to taxi and labor laws, Uber plans to spend an extraordinary $90 million in 2016 on lobbying and public relations, according to a filing.
His strategy often involved going over the heads of city mayors and transportation authorities and straight 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 at the time. A note from the meeting described Osborne as a “strong defender”.
In a statement, Osborne said the government’s express policy at the time was to meet with global technology firms and “convince them to invest in Britain and create jobs here”.
While the Davos meeting with Osborne was announced, the figures reveal that six British Tory cabinet ministers had undisclosed meetings with Uber. It is not clear whether the meetings should have been announced, revealing confusion over how UK lobbying rules are applied.
Taxis block Whitehall during a protest against the decision to grant Uber a license to operate in London in 2016. Picture: Andy Rain/EPA
The documents show that Uber is adept at finding unofficial routes to power, exerting influence through friends or middlemen or seeking meetings with politicians where aides and officials are not present.
He enlisted the support of influential figures in places like Russia, Italy and Germany, offering them valuable financial stakes in the startup and turning them into “strategic investors.”
And in an effort to shape political debates, it has paid prominent scientists hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce research that supports the company’s claims about the benefits of its economic model.
Despite a well-funded and persistent lobbying operation, Uber’s efforts have had mixed results. In some places, Uber has been able to convince governments to rewrite the laws with lasting effect. But elsewhere the company found itself blocked by established taxi industries, outbid by local taxi rivals or opposed by left-wing politicians who simply refused to budge.
A demonstrator holds a torch during a protest in Paris against Uber. Photo: Francois Maury/AP
When it faced opposition, Uber tried to turn it to its advantage, using it to fuel the narrative that its technology was disrupting outdated transportation systems and urging governments to reform their laws.
As Uber launches across India, Kalanick’s top executive in Asia urged executives to focus on driving growth even as “fires start to burn.” “Know that this is a normal part of Uber’s business,” he said. “Embrace the chaos. It means you are doing something meaningful.
Kalanick appeared to put that ethos into practice in January 2016, when Uber’s attempts to upend markets in Europe led to angry protests in Belgium, Spain, Italy and France by taxi drivers who feared for their livelihoods.
Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French leaders to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.
Warned that this risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “far-right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoilt for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Warranty for violence[s] Good luck. And these guys have to be resisted, right? Agreed…
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