Meg Whitman really isn’t going to be the next Uber CEO
It’s just not happening
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Jena McGregor.
Before Thursday night, Hewlett Packard Enterprise chief executive Meg Whitman had only sent three tweets since becoming CEO of HP in 2011.
Then, Thursday night, she sent three more.
Thus, the former eBay CEO, Disney executive and gubernatorial candidate in California knocked down the idea that she would become the next CEO of Uber.
Is it too late for Uber?
Many women are no longer interested in working for the tech giant
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Currently, the embattled ride-sharing company is seeking a new leader following a series of controversies that included allegations of sexual harassment and inappropriate behavior.
After Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick stepped down in June, the Wall Street Journal had reported that Uber and its five-member search committee viewed Whitman as a candidate.
An unusual move
It’s unusual to see a CEO pour cold water so publicly on speculation about future jobs. More often, a company spokesperson steps in and tries to squash the rumor, as HPE’s representatives had already done several times. In the days preceding the Journal’s report, several outlets had reported that Whitman was in the running, and a spokesperson for her company responded that “as Meg has said several times before, she is fully committed to HPE and plans to stay with the company until her work is done.”
Who will be Uber’s CEO?
The parlor game of guessing who will become Uber’s next CEO has been going on since earlier in the summer, when Kalanick first took a leave of absence. Despite many vacant jobs among its top leadership and an open search for a chief operating officer, the company did not name an interim CEO at that point, or when Kalanick later stepped down from the job entirely but remained on the board.
Some have suggested a female CEO could be a helpful addition as the company tries to overhaul its aggressive culture and move past the allegations of sexual harassment that have become a lightning rod issue across the industry. Whitman, a former Disney executive who led and scaled up a previously founder-led business — and has been leading a turnaround at HP, one of the few women to run a major technology company — was often named as a possibility.
The job, seen by some as a thankless one that will involve revamping a troubled startup and dealing with a competitive founder who remains on the board, has reportedly had plenty of interest. According to the Journal, the firm hopes to complete the search process by Labor Day. An e-mail to a spokesperson for Uber was not immediately returned.
