Dear Travis Kalanick, CEO of Uber,
Not so long ago your company was going so totally nowhere-but-up- up-up, we thought you’d soon roll out an Uber-Batmobile, just because you could. Because that’s the kind of thing you’d do, because the bigger you’ve become and the more we’ve come to know you, the more of an alpha-pony show-off you’ve revealed yourself to be.
Who else would, in the nut-buzzing giddiness of explaining how easy it is to get laid when you’re the head of a company last valuated at $18.2 billion, tell a GQ writer that the female curation process could be thought of as “Boob-er”? It’s the kind of bravado that might propel you up the hill, and the gusto to blow you off the cliff.
And your man Emil Michael? Uber’s senior VP of business said what at a party to fucking Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith? He wanted to spend a million dollars to smite certain media personalities not reporting on you guys favourably? And what, the Buzzfeed journalist didn’t think what Emil said at a party, at a non-interview, was off the record? Not sure who to feel sorry for there, chaps – Uber’s image, the Buzzfeed guy, or journalism itself.
It’s been a tough couple of months, Travis. We know. Inciting the first working-class barricade of Paris since the French Revolution, having low-cost UberPop banned in the rest of France as well as Holland and Germany; it isn’t a look you wanted hanging in your corporate wardrobe. We get that. And you apologized for Emil in a series of tweets, each a single line long so you could have some time to think in between: gotta make sure everything’s spelled correctly, otherwise people might think you’re something of a pant-hooting frat-douche.
But it’s not even for these reasons we at GQ don’t trust you, Trav. Even when we first heard about your company, we were already sick of non-German speaking kids prefixing ‘über’ to whatever otherwise overused and uncreative words were seeping out of their hashtagged gobs. You do know that outside German, any letter with an umlaut is the most foreboding a letter can be? Only Motörhead can use the umlaut, and then not use it whenever they want, because they’re Motörhead, and only they make the umlaut cool. This exception, and this exception only.
We are also inveterate rewatchers of films from Hollywood’s late-Seventies auteur period, and thinking of the name “Travis” anywhere near a “Taxi Driver” kind of gives us the heebie-jeebies.
And, broseph. Delhi.
We in India didn’t need another one of those Delhi rape stories. We really didn’t. Women going through something like that while simply trying to get from somewhere to home is never anything less than devastating. And since your Asia bro apologized, and since the slurry of op-eds followed as expected, more than any accountability relating to whatever social ills already exist here, we’d rather ask you this: do you realize this fuck-up cost you one of the biggest business opportunities on the subcontinent?
We’d like to presume that before Uber began operating in Delhi you knew it was not a safe city for women. That providing a transport service where women felt unquestionably comfortable in a public vehicle would make you not only richer, but might raise the standards of an already competitive but still ramshackle industry. Which, in turn, would mean you’d have contributed more to public safety in that dusty toilet of a city than any one businessman in modern times. You could drop the idea of that Uber-Batmobile, because to the lawful people of Delhi, you would have been fucking Batman.
We know that would have appealed to you.
Next time Bruce,
GQ India.
