In a video recorded on Super Bowl Sunday in early February, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick took an Uber black car along with two female friends. During the ride, he and his driver, Fawzi Kamel, get into a heated argument about Uber’s falling prices, which Kamel claims cost him $97,000 over an unspecified period of time.
“You’re raising the standards, and you’re dropping the prices,” Kamel says.
In the video, which Kamel, 37, gave to Bloomberg, Kalanick reacts in the way one would expect him to react, if one has followed any news about the prickly and embattled CEO: he reacts like a dick. After making an incredibly douche-y boast to his companions that Uber’s recent rough stretch is some sort of strategy decision—”That’s kind of how I roll. I make sure every year is a hard year. If it’s easy I’m not pushing hard enough.”—he tells Kamel that the price cuts were necessary to keep the company afloat. When Kamel points out how Uber had bested Lyft (“it’s a piece of cake,” Kamel says) which is seen by many as a lower-quality offering, Kalanick says: “It seems like a piece of cake because I’ve beaten them. But if I didn’t do the things I did, we would have been beaten, I promise.”
Then things really go off the rails. The exchange culminates not with the rich Silicon Valley CEO listening to an ostensible employee voicing reasonable concerns, but by telling him his problems are all of his own making.
“Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit,” he tells Kamel. “They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”
Kamel responds with, “Good luck to you, but I know [you’re not] going to go far.”
When the time came for Kamel to rate his fare, he awarded Kalanick just one star.
See the full video, below.
