Uber’s origin story begins with an $800 ride on a snowy New Year’s Eve in Paris in 2009. Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick launched UberCab in San Francisco in 2011 as a luxury black car service costing about 50 percent more than a taxi, and even hired a nuclear physicist and a computational neuroscientist to sharpen arrival predictions. Kalanick had dismissed peer-to-peer ridesharing as illegal and doomed, but as Lyft, Sidecar and Wingz gained ground the company launched UberX in 2012 and 2013 and opened the platform to everyday drivers. It then entered cities without permission and counted on rider demand to make shutting it down politically costly.

The episode details Greyball, software that showed ghost cars or denied rides to suspected regulators and police, and Ripley, a tool used more than 20 times in 2015 and 2016 to lock and power off office computers during raids. Susan Fowler’s 2017 blog post on harassment set off executive departures, and a 2016 breach of data on 57 million riders and about 600,000 drivers was covered up with a $100,000 payment booked as a bug bounty, leading to obstruction charges against former security chief Joe Sullivan. Kalanick resigned in 2017 and Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia took over. Fights over driver classification followed, from California’s AB5 and Proposition 22 to a UK Supreme Court ruling, before the company posted its first operating profit in 2023 and reached $52 billion in revenue by 2025.

• The company hired the security firm Ergo to secretly investigate a class action plaintiff, and the judge threw out the evidence gathered.
• Executive Emil Michael had suggested spending $1 million on opposition research into critical journalists, including Sarah Lacy.
• Dutch regulators fined it over 800 million euros over automated driver deactivations, plus 290 million euros for moving driver data to US servers.
• In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission sued over Uber One sign-ups and cancellation practices.
• In March 2026 it agreed to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian for up to 50,000 robotaxis, and in September 2026 it cut 10 percent of its corporate staff.