It was the middle of winter of 2017, and Jeff Jones, the man responsible for Uber’s public perception, was trying to shake everyone in the top ranks of the company awake. Uber didn’t have an image problem. Uber had a Travis problem.

As president of ride-sharing and the only person on the executive leadership team with a history of marketing experience, Jones took it upon himself to study the root of the hatred of Uber’s brand, something he hadn’t anticipated before he joined. Jones knew people who thought Travis was an asshole, but he wasn’t prepared for this.

Former engineer Susan Fowler’s blog post describing a toxic work environment at Uber had made things exponentially more complicated. Four days later, a lawsuit filed by Waymo created an enormous new problem: Uber’s new self-driving leader appeared to be a literal thief and potential criminal. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Three days later, one of Uber’s marquee hires, Amit Singhal—the man responsible for perfecting Google’s search algorithms—was forced to resign from Uber before he could even begin his new job. Kalanick had announced his hire just a month previously, thrilling Uber’s employees. Instead, just days after Waymo’s lawsuit dropped, the press uncovered the fact that Singhal was pushed out of Google for claims of sexual harassment, something that Google executives were silent about during his departure. (Singhal has consistently denied the allegations.) Kalanick didn’t know about the claim when he hired him. For Uber, the timing could not have been worse.

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But Jones wanted more data. When he first started at Uber, Jones told Kalanick he wanted to commission surveys into how people viewed Uber, and how those same people viewed Kalanick, separately, as well. The company didn’t really have any data on such questions, and Jones wanted to see what they said.

Months later, the data came back. Jones called most of the executive leadership team to join him on a two-day leadership off-site retreat away from the office. He asked Kalanick not to attend—he wanted to go over the data with the executive leadership team alone, not in front of the big boss, and hoped Kalanick could respect that. Kalanick bristled at the request, but Jones was adamant, and ultimately Kalanick stood down.

In late February, the group—roughly a dozen executives from all of Uber’s different divisions—gathered in downtown San Francisco’s Le Méridien, a hotel off Battery Street in the financial district, to go over the results of the survey, among other things. Jones had booked a meeting room for the discussion; he had a PowerPoint presentation prepared so that the rest of the executive leadership team could understand the data.

The results were clear: People enjoyed using Uber as a service. But when you brought up Travis Kalanick, customers recoiled. Kalanick’s negative profile was actively making Uber’s brand worse.

Later that day, Jones got a text from Kalanick. The CEO was coming over to join the meeting. Kalanick didn’t like feeling left out while all his top lieutenants were discussing the future of his company. As Kalanick walked into the hotel meeting room filled with his executives, he saw charts, surveys, and studies taped to the walls. In the center of a room was a giant piece of paper with a sentence written on it. The group came up with what it believed Uber’s image was to outsiders, written in bold, black ink: A bunch of young bro bullies that have achieved ridiculous success. It was a hard point to argue.

Nonetheless, Kalanick began to push back on Jones’s findings immediately, rebutting the data he saw on the wall. “Nuh-uh,” Kalanick said. “I don’t believe it, man. I don’t see it.” His lieutenants were flabbergasted. Even in the midst of the most sustained set of crises in Uber’s history, Kalanick couldn’t see the literal writing on the wall. Aaron Schildkrout, who led Uber’s driver product development, leapt to defend Jones and the data. Daniel Graf and Rachel Holt— two other well-respected leaders—joined him. Kalanick didn’t love Jones at that point, but he respected Graf and Schildkrout, and Holt had been with him since the early days of Uber. And all three were supportive of the surveys. If anyone could get him to listen, it would be them.

The argument was interrupted. Rachel Whetstone, Uber’s communications head, got a phone call, and stepped out of the room into the hallway to take it. Moments later, Whetstone signaled for Jill Hazelbaker, her second-in-command at policy and comms, to join her in the hallway. Something bad was happening, but none of the executives in the room knew how bad it would turn out to be.

Moments later, Jones joined the communications heads in the hallway, followed by Kalanick. Whetstone grabbed a laptop from the conference room and set it down on a chair in front of them. She opened a web page to Bloomberg News’ website; they had just posted a story about Kalanick online. At the top of the article was a video clip.

The four executives huddled around the laptop, with Kalanick kneeling on the floor in front of the chair. They watched as a grainy dashcam video began playing. Shot from inside an Uber, the video shows a driver with three passengers: two women and a man, Travis Kalanick, sandwiched in between them in the back seat.

It begins innocuously, the tinny audio capturing snippets of the group’s conversation and shared laughter—the giddiness suggested a tipsy ride home from a night out. As a Maroon 5 song plays on the radio, Kalanick starts shimmying his shoulders, swaying to the beat. As they watched their boss on camera, some in the room could only think of one word: “douchebag.”

As Kalanick and his friends pull up to their destination, the driver strikes up a conversation, acknowledging that he knows who Kalanick is. Then the video takes a turn. Fawzi Kamel, the driver, presses Kalanick on Uber’s dropping prices for customers, which in turn has hit the drivers hard. “I lost $97,000 because of you,” Kamel tells him, “I’m bankrupt because of you. You keep changing every day.”

“Hold on a second!” Kalanick interrupts. The conversation starts getting heated. “What have I changed about [Uber] Black?”

“You dropped everything!” Kamel pushes back.

“Bullshit. You know what?” Kalanick says, beginning to get out of the car. “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit!” he shouts, now shouting over Kamel’s protests and into his face.

Kalanick raises a finger and jabs it into the air as he finishes his thought. “They blame EVERYTHING in their life on somebody ELSE. Good luck,” he jabs back. Kalanick exits the car to a shouting Kamel, disappearing from the frame of the video seconds before it ends. Someone closed the laptop.

Kalanick—the flesh and blood one in the hotel that Tuesday morning—already brought to his knees, began muttering to his lieutenants. “This is bad. This is really bad.” He fell further forward, writhing around on the floor. “What is wrong with me?” he yelped.

None of the executives knew what to do. Seeing Kalanick squirm like this made them deeply uncomfortable.

Kalanick dialed the only person he felt he could turn to; he called Arianna Huffington. “Arianna, we need help,” he cried into his phone. “How are we going to get out of this? This is so bad. I fucked up.” Huffington cooed platitudes into the phone, attempting to calm down the distraught Kalanick.

Jones tried to offer some solace, suggesting talking to crisis P.R. firms to help strategize and figure out what to do next to pull Uber out of its tailspin.

“There are experts who can help us here, Travis,” Jones said.

Whetstone disagreed. “I don’t think you’re going to find better people than me and Jill,” she offered. Whetstone believed the P.R. leaders could still pull him out of this disaster.

Kalanick lashed out, directing his anger toward Whetstone and Hazelbaker. “You two aren’t strategic or creative enough to help us get out of this situation,” he said. The room was silent as Kalanick’s insult hung in the air. Whetstone and Hazelbaker had had enough. The two of them stood up, gathered their belongings, and walked out of the room.

Kalanick soon realized his mistake: He had pissed off the very people trying to protect him from a press corps that was about to tear him apart. As he chased his communications executives down the hotel hallway to try and convince them to stay, Hazelbaker confronted him.

“How dare you!” she screamed, inches from Kalanick’s face, as the rest of the group watched in shock. “I’ve walked through fire for you and this company! You did this TO YOURSELF!” (One witness to the confrontation between Hazelbaker and Kalanick recalled the communications executive using far more colorful vocabulary during the encounter.)

As the group split and the day wound down, Kalanick eventually managed to convince Whetstone and Hazelbaker not to quit their posts. Half of the group made its way back to Hazelbaker’s townhouse, a 20-minute Uber ride away in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow district. Hazelbaker ordered takeout for the group.

Sitting on the sofas in Hazelbaker’s living room, Uber’s top executives shared pizza and beer and mulled their options. Meanwhile, Kalanick continued his theatrics, writhing around on Hazelbaker’s carpet. Kalanick kept repeating the same thing over and over: “I’m a terrible person. I’m a terrible person. I’m a terrible person.”

Whetstone tried to console him, half-heartedly. “You aren’t a terrible person. But you do do terrible things,” she said.

By the end of the day, Whetstone, Hazelbaker, and Kalanick had settled up a statement to hand out to reporters. By then, the press and the public were frothing at the video, which had gone viral. Here was conclusive proof that Kalanick didn’t care about drivers. That he partied like a douchebag. That Travis Kalanick was, in fact, an asshole.

Later that evening, Kalanick circulated an apology memo to his employees. They posted the memo to the company’s public blog the next morning.

By now I’m sure you’ve seen the video where I treated an Uber driver disrespectfully. To say that I am ashamed is an extreme understatement. My job as your leader is to lead...and that starts with behaving in a way that makes us all proud. That is not what I did, and it cannot be explained away.

It’s clear this video is a reflection of me—and the criticism we’ve received is a stark reminder that I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up. This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help and I intend to get it.

I want to profoundly apologize to Fawzi, as well as the driver and rider community, and to the Uber team.

—Travis

The memo wouldn’t put an end to Uber’s troubles—and, in the end, it foreshadowed Kalanick’s exit four months later. One of the P.R. experts that Uber consulted at the height of the crisis was Steven Rubenstein, who regularly worked for the Murdoch family. Rubenstein ultimately decided not to take on Kalanick as a client, but as a parting gift, he offered two pieces of advice: First, Kalanick had to “find his Sheryl,” a reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with Sheryl Sandberg, then widely considered a competent counterbalance to Zuck’s leadership. Second, he said Kalanick needed to take a leave of absence. “You either shoot yourself in the foot, or the press will end up shooting you in the head.”

Reprinted from Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac. Copyright © 2019 by Mike Isaac. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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