Uber Executive Suggested Company Hire Team to Dig up Dirt on Journalists

First there was Grubergate. Now we have Ubergate.

Reports of questionable behavior emanating from the executive suite at ridesharing company Uber are nothing new. My antennae first shot straight upward when I read that the company had hired one of Barack Obama’s chief political strategists, David Plouffe, as a senior vice president of policy and strategy. The Washington Post covered this in the article: Uber hired David Plouffe when it realized ‘techies’ can’t do politics.

Around the exact same time, The Verge reported on the company’s playbook for sabotaging its competitor, Lyft. You can read that article here. Something seemed a little fishy, but I pretty much forgot all about it.

Well the latest revelation is simply something I can’t ignore. Thanks to a piece published yesterday at Buzzfeed, we now have an idea of the sick mindset of one of the company’s senior executives. Even worse, this guy sits on a board that advises the Department of Defense.

Buzzfeed reports that:

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

His remarks came as Uber seeks to improve its relationship with the media and the image of its management team, who have been cast as insensitive and hyper-aggressive even as the company’s business and cultural reach have boomed.

Michael, who has been at Uber for more than a year as its senior vice president of business, floated the idea at a dinner Friday at Manhattan’s Waverly Inn attended by an influential New York crowd including actor Ed Norton and publisher Arianna Huffington. The dinner was hosted by Ian Osborne, a former adviser to British Prime Minister David Cameron and consultant to the company.

Michael, who Kalanick described as “one of the top deal guys in the Valley” when he joined the company, is a charismatic and well-regarded figure who came to Uber from Klout. He also sits on a board that advises the Department of Defense.

Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber.

Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”

Emil Michael had a specific reporter in mind. Her name is Sarah Lacy, the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. Here is some of what she had to say in response to the Buzzfeed article (read the whole thing here):

Uber’s dangerous escalation of behavior has just had its whistleblower moment, and tellingly, the whistleblower wasn’t a staffer with a conscience, it was an executive boasting about the proposed plan. It’s gone so far, that there are those in the company who don’t even realize this is something you try to cover up. It’s like a five-year-old pretending to be Frank Underwood. Only one with billions of dollars of assets at his disposal.

And lest you think this was just a rogue actor and not part of the company’s game plan, let me remind you Kalanick (Uber’s CEO) telegraphed exactly this sort of thing when he sat on stage at the Code Conference last spring and said he was hiring political operatives whose job would be to “throw mud.” I naively thought he just meant Taxi companies. Let me also remind you: This is a company you trust with your personal safety every single time you use it. Let me also remind you: The executive in question has not been fired.

Unsurprisingly, it appears the lack of ethics and sliminess so pervasive in the halls of power throughout these United States is also alive and well in the startup world. There’s seems to be little hope of escaping it.

Sad.

In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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