“This Time, Things Will Be Different,” says Uber CEO For Tenth Time
1455 MARKET STREET, SAN FRANCISCO — To no one’s surprise, Uber is in deep trouble again. In an email sent to employees today, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick vowed to address recent sexual harassment claims by “doing things right this time” despite having said the same thing ten different times during the last four years with questionable effect. The email was sent in response to a blog post written by a former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler, who described being repeatedly sexually harassed during her time at the company while HR officials turned a blind eye or even protected the offenders.
“I wholeheartedly condemn the behavior described in her blog post,” wrote Mr. Kalanick, who had once joked to a GQ journalist about starting a woman-on-demand service called Boob-er. “This is the first time that this sort of misconduct has come to my attention. I guess I just didn’t realize how I hired a bunch of brogrammer douchebags to run my company until now.”
Mr. Kalanick, who had said at an internal all-hands that drivers were “expendable” and had previously been described by Uber employees as “ethically challenged,” argued that the media has given Uber a bad rap for its response to previous scandals and is ignoring how the company is a force for good. “Uber is not the bad guy here,” he wrote, presumably whilst dressed in a hooded robe and seated in the executive antechamber of his company’s Death-Star-like SOMA headquarters.
From spying on customers, threatening journalists, and violating self-driving car safety laws, Mr. Kalanick believes Uber is making the world a better place by making Uber better than everyone else. “Uber does not condone unethical behavior. We just practice it.”
Mr. Kalanick also dismissed rumors that more than a hundred employees had resigned in the last day in reaction to Ms. Fowler’s blog post, claiming that the resignations were “part of an internal HR program we launched to foster a hostile work environment so unwanted employees will quit without us having to fire them and give them unemployment benefits… but that’s not at all related to sexual harassment, which I personally find to be appalling.”
“But don’t worry about it. We take these problems very seriously. This time, we’ll handle it the right way. I am 100% confident that by doing the exact same things as we did the last ten times, we will achieve a different and more desirable result.”
“Change comes from the top,” wrote Mr. Kalanick, “and I don’t think I’m going to be going anywhere anytime soon. So I’ll repeat it again: this time, things will be different. I guarantee it.”
