The tone of the meeting was grave. “I didn’t hear any question of ‘Should we fight this, is this wrong, is this not true?’ ” Hornsey said. “I just heard, ‘Bloody hell, if this is true, we need to get serious.’ ” The company hired Eric Holder, the former U.S. Attorney General, who is now a partner at Covington & Burling, to lead an external investigation into Uber’s culture. Another law firm, Perkins Coie, was retained to investigate the Fowler allegations and other accusations of misconduct. Two days later, Huffington, who was acting as a sort of in-house corporate therapist, proposed an addition to Uber’s cultural values: “No brilliant jerks allowed.”

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The negative news continued to accumulate. On February 23rd, Waymo, the autonomous-driving unit founded by Google, filed a lawsuit against Uber, alleging that it had stolen confidential information pertaining to lidar, a laser-based scanning technology. On February 26th, a high-ranking Uber employee was dismissed after the company discovered that he had left his previous job, at Google, over a sexual-harassment claim. Two days later, just as Uber was preparing to announce measures intended to repair its relationship with drivers, Bloomberg posted a dashboard video that showed Kalanick riding in the back of a luxury Uber black car, partying with two young women. In the video, Kalanick gets into an argument with the driver after he complains about Uber cutting rates and making it hard to earn a living. The argument escalates, and Kalanick angrily tells the driver, “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else!” Three days later, the Times reported on a secret internal Uber program called Greyball, which gave law-enforcement agents and government officials a fake version of the Uber app to impede investigations of the service. Then reports emerged about another covert program, called Hell, which Uber had used to identify drivers who were working for Lyft and lure them away.

Lyft’s corporate image, including its puffy pink logo, was more welcoming than Uber’s, and the company was notably scandal-free. As riders defected from Uber, Lyft went from underdog to formidable competitor, raising $1.7 billion and growing its share of the American market to more than thirty per cent. Morale among Uber employees, meanwhile, was low. Wayne Ting, a former general manager of Uber in San Francisco, who is now Khosrowshahi’s chief of staff, told me, “I think in 2017 a lot of us were learning about some of the stuff that was happening from the media. It was shocking, it was inexcusable.” Ting described the year leading up to Kalanick’s departure as an “out-of-body experience.” “It prompted a lot of reflection,” he said. “Do I want to stay? What are the things I need to see change in order for me to want to stay?”

One former Uber employee told me that people in the San Francisco office were concerned—but not for the reasons the headlines implied. “The elephant in the room was whether the business model even works,” he said. Uber was spending billions of dollars to subsidize rides in order to keep rates low and passengers coming back. Its competitors were doing the same thing. The only way Uber could become profitable was to both increase the volume of rides and raise the price of each one. But as long as Lyft or another rival was offering discounts, increasing fares was impossible, because consumers would simply switch to the cheaper app. And as long as venture capital continued to flow into ride-hailing, Uber’s rivals would continue to offer discounted rides. “How do they reduce the subsidies for the rides and not lose volume is the big math puzzle,” the former employee told me. In 2017, Uber grew substantially, but it also reported $4.47 billion in losses.

In early June, Uber announced the results of the two investigations into workplace misconduct. The company had fired twenty employees and placed thirty-one others in training or counselling. On June 11th, the Uber board, including Kalanick, gathered to hear a presentation on the findings of Holder’s team, which had reviewed three million documents and interviewed two hundred current and former employees. The report painted a harsh picture of the company and recommended forty-seven changes, including restructuring the board of directors to make it more independent and restricting alcohol and drug use at company events. A compliance consultant described the report as “one of the most remarkable discussions of a complete workplace culture disaster that has ever been rendered for a multi-billion business. If you changed some of the business and legal language, you might well think you were reading a report on Animal House.”

The week before the board meeting, Kalanick’s parents had been in a boating accident. His mother had died and his father had been seriously injured, and Kalanick was grief-stricken. The board discussed whether Kalanick should take a leave of absence, to mourn as well as to relieve the barrage of negative publicity. According to a person familiar with the meeting, at one point David Bonderman, a board member and a co-founder of the investment firm TPG, told Kalanick, “Travis, frankly, I cannot imagine this company without you, and I cannot imagine this company with you.” The board asked Kalanick to take an open-ended leave. In the meantime, the company would be managed by a committee of sixteen executives. Nine days later, two partners from Benchmark surprised Kalanick by handing him a letter from a group of investors asking him to resign immediately and threatening to publicly campaign against him if he did not. It wasn’t clear what had changed since the board meeting, but Kalanick complied and stepped down.

Khosrowshahi sometimes wears a T-shirt with the words “We Are All Dreamers” printed across the front. He often speaks of his experience finding asylum in America after his family fled Iran, in 1978. When Trump issued his executive order on immigration, Expedia joined other technology companies in a declaration of support for a lawsuit that the State of Washington had filed against the ban. Since then, Khosrowshahi has made his contempt for the President’s policies clear. In August, amid controversy over Trump’s response to violent protests in Charlottesville, Khosrowshahi wrote on Twitter, “I keep waiting for the moment when our Prez will rise to the expectations of his office and he fails, repeatedly.”

Khosrowshahi’s family led a prosperous upper-class life in Tehran until the Iranian Revolution threw the country into chaos. A wealthy uncle lived in New York, and the Khosrowshahis, after escaping temporarily to the South of France, where the family had vacationed in the past, immigrated to the United States and moved into a three-bedroom condominium in Tarrytown. Shortly after they arrived in the U.S., fifty-two American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran, a crisis that lasted more than a year and created a surge of anti-Iranian sentiment in America. The family watched from across an ocean as their manufacturing business, which produced consumer and pharmaceutical goods under brands licensed from Western countries, was nationalized by the new Islamic government.

Khosrowshahi’s parents put their remaining resources into their children’s education, enrolling Khosrowshahi and his two brothers at Hackley, the prep school that their cousins attended. Khosrowshahi was in the fifth grade, and spoke less than perfect English. “It was a tough adjustment at first,” he told me. “But we knew how to play soccer. My brothers were total soccer gods within the school. And that was our in to being socially accepted.” Khosrowshahi was drawn to the sciences, and his father encouraged him to become a doctor. In Iran, Khosrowshahi explained, “the heroes of the world were the engineers or the doctors.” When he was in his early teens, his father returned to Iran to take care of his own father, who was ill. He was arrested by the government and detained for six years. Khosrowshahi’s mother, left to care for three teen-age boys, took a job as a salesperson at a high-end women’s-clothing boutique in Manhattan—the sort of store she had previously frequented as a client. “I think there was this undercurrent within my family, which was that we had lost everything,” Khosrowshahi told me. In his first address to Uber employees, in August, he put it more bluntly: “There’s this chip you have on your shoulder as an immigrant that drives you.”