Hubert Horan: Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Thirty-Four – Tony West’s Calamitous Legacy at Uber and with the Kamala Harris Campaign

Yves here. Hubert Horan below explains how the narrative/propaganda-driven strategy of Uber, as opposed to one based on creating fundamental economic value, was essentially the same as the one pursued by the Democratic party in the Harris campaign. Tony West was a both a designer and hands-on implementer of these approaches.

I must confess that as a finance person, through all through Hubert’s series, I could not believe that grown up investors, even if being in Silicon Valley made them barely so, would pour billions into a business because ideology. Hubert’s latest article makes it make a bit more sense.

Hubert also has a Part 35 piece on FY2024 Uber/Lyft P&Ls planned for later in the month.

By Hubert Horan, who has 40 years of experience in the management and regulation of transportation companies (primarily airlines) and has been publishing analysis of Uber since 2016. Horan has no financial links with any urban car service industry competitors, investors or regulators, or any firms that work on behalf of industry participants.

While primarily focused on Uber’s competitive and financial performance, this series has also discussed the broader economic and political context of the issues driving that performance. One cannot begin to understand Uber without understanding how high-growth unicorn-type companies became darlings of capital markets, the growth of tech utopianism and the valorization of “tech” investors, longstanding political wars against public goods and interests, how propaganda/PR narratives are manufactured and promulgated, how capital markets have become more focused on narratives and memes than business fundamentals, and similar issues.

The linkage between Uber and the 2024 Presidential campaign may not seem obvious, but Tony West’s major role in the Presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, his sister-in-law, illustrates that Uber is now a respected member of the national political establishment, an idea that would have seemed laughable not long ago. West has been Uber’s general counsel and chief legal officer for nearly a decade serving both Travis Kalanick and Dara Khosrowshahi.

Democrats have been in disarray since their November defeat. Understanding West’s central role in the Harris campaign and the close parallels to his work at Uber may shed light on what happened.

West’s Central Role in Uber’s Attempt to Cover Up Its Intimidation of a Rape Victim

As was described in detail in Part Ten of this series [1], West led a major 2017 attempt to hide Uber efforts to discredit a woman raped by an Uber driver. The rape cover-up was part of a larger effort to diffuse growing awareness of Uber’s ruthless conduct under Kalanick (e.g. theft of Waymo intellectual property, obstruction of law enforcement investigations, intimidation of critical journalists, widely accepted reports of systematic sexual harassment by senior Uber executives [2]) and the initial reports of huge losses that threatened Uber’s narrative about massive efficiencies that would allow it to quickly dominate urban car services globally.

West brought in Eric Holder, his former boss at the Department of Justice, to lead an “independent” review. Under Holder, West was responsible for the DOJ’s investigation as to whether major financial firms had any legal responsibility for causing the Great Recession. We know how that turned out.

Here West made sure that Holder’s scope was limited to narrow sexual harassment charges. It excluded the intimidation of competitors, regulators and journalists  as well as any of Uber’s governance and financial issues.

The initial West/Holder report found no problems with anyone in Kalanick’s senior executive team, proposed various actions designed to blunt calls for stronger reforms (e.g. rethinking Uber’s value statement, increased leadership training) and allowed Uber’s Board to claim that “Yes, there were some bad apples, unquestionably. But this is not a systemic problem.”[3]

But frustrated Uber employees leaked information showing that that West and Holder were aware that Kalanick and other senior executives had obtained confidential police reports they hoped would discredit the rape victim but kept this information out of the draft report. The public disclosures [4] forced a hasty rewrite of the report, the dismissal of Kalanick and the two members of his inner circle directly involved with the rape case, and the subsequent hiring of Dara Khosrowshahi.

The West/Holder whitewash was designed to obscure the fact that the Board had fully supported the ruthless Kalanick-era hostility to drivers, competitors, journalists or anyone seeking to enforce existing laws and regulations. The Board believed that only a monomaniacal drive for industry dominance could produce big returns on the $13 billion investors had provided.

Even though Uber’s PR changed gear to claim that all of Uber’s problems were due to Kalanick behavior (which the hiring of Khosrowshahi had fully solved), the Board never identified any specific misconduct. Every member of Kalanick’s senior management team that had not directly handled the confidential police reports about the rape (including West) remained in place.

West’s Central Role in Uber’s Battle Against Legislation Protecting Driver Rights

After Khosrowshahi’s hiring and the IPO, West’s primary job was to combat various efforts to enforce and strengthen existing legal/regulatory protections for drivers, in particular California’s Assembly Bill 5. AB 5 formally codified California’s Supreme Court guidelines that restricted classifying workers as independent contractors to cases where workers had total control of work hours and the prices charged to customers and were not a central part of a company’s core business.

Uber and the other gig companies flouted AB5, and did not reclassify any drivers as employees. West’s initial response was to claim a law that specifically covered ride-sharing companies could not apply to Uber because, as West claimed it was not a transportation company but “a technology platform for several different types of digital marketplaces,” and “Drivers’ work is outside the usual course of Uber’s business.” West was simply repeating longstanding Kalanick-era PR memes, and was quickly rejected in California, just as similar Uber claims in Europe had been dismissed out of hand.

West then dramatically escalated the battle, drafting a ballot measure known as Proposition 22 designed to overturn the Supreme Court rules and AB5. West, who had been Chief Counsel for Pepsico before joining the DOJ, had long experience waging lawfare against public efforts to rein in the use of sugary foods on public health grounds.

But West knew the challenge at Uber was much more existential, since Uber had lost over $27 billion through 2020, was about to lose billions more due to the pandemic, and had no conceivable hope of breaking even unless it could cram driver compensation down to the lowest possible level.

While Prop 22 promised drivers some incremental benefits, it reduced the true earning potential of full-time drivers by nearly two-thirds relative to AB5, provided no mechanism for enforcing those limited promises, almost completely eliminated the rights of gig workers to organize or collectively bargain and barred any local governments from enacting any new regulation of gig-companies.

Uber, Lyft and the food delivery companies put over $200 million into the pro-Prop 200 PR/propaganda campaign, hiring over a dozen consulting/PR companies, most of whom had experience with union-busting, helping major industries (tobacco, agriculture, oil, chemicals) fight labor law initiatives, or supporting the campaigns of Republican politicians. [5]

The primary arguments for Prop 22 were that it would lead to higher ride-sharing fares and that Uber/Lyft drivers overwhelmingly opposed being reclassified as employees because they highly valued the “flexibility” of being independent contractors.

Prop 22 won by a 59-41% margin, having outspent opponents by a margin of over 10 to1.

But in this time period consumer fares were only covering 62-70% of Uber’s actual operating expenses. Thus Uber claims that Prop 22 would significantly reduce the risk of higher fares was false.

The claims about driver opposition to Prop 22 were also largely false. The numerical majority of Uber drivers only worked a few hours a week, but the majority of trip-hours were logged by full-time-drivers. West’s Prop 22 campaign improperly portrayed simplistic headcount-based polls as representative of overall driver opinions. Responses to Uber’s surveys had also been influenced by false Uber claims that AB5 prohibited the scheduling flexibility needed to accommodate part-time drivers. [6]

The stock market expressed its support for the passage of Prop 22, immediately raising the market capitalization of Uber by $36 billion (over 60%) and demonstrating why these companies, despite huge losses, were happy to spend $200 million to get it passed.

The fact that Uber had lost over $30 billion up to this point under robust economic conditions, and then suffered from the huge pandemic-driven collapse in ridership illustrated the huge value that Wall Street placed on a company’s ability to establish enough market power to suppress worker compensation and to overwhelm governmental efforts to protect those workers. Wall Street valued these labor-to-capital wealth transfers so much that it was willing to overlook that Uber could not provide any evidence at that point of business fundamentals that could produce sustainable profits.  When Biden’s Labor Secretary Marty Walsh announced a general intention to review employee classification rules and practices two years later Uber and Lyft lost a combined $20 billion in equity value overnight. [7]

Prop 22 was subsequently voided in August 2021 because a ballot initiative could not nullify the  Constitution provision explicitly granting the State the authority to regulate labor working conditions. It also violated the requirement that ballot initiatives could not cover more than one subject, including the prohibition on unionization which “appears only to protect the economic interests of the network companies in having a divided, un-unionized workforce, which is not a stated goal of the legislation.”[8] As after the original passage of AB5 Uber and Lyft simply refused to reclassify any drivers as employees after the court rejected Prop 22.

West’s final victory in this battle came in March 2024 when the California Supreme Court reinstated the critical parts of Prop 22. When the decision was announced Uber stock rose over 6% while Lyft stock jumped 5%. The court severed the elimination of driver collective bargaining rights, despite existing case law saying that ballot provisions had to stand or fall as voted on and could not be rewritten after the fact since judges could not determine which provisions led to its passage. It also rejected the earlier finding that ballot propositions could not overturn activities authorized by the state’s Constitution. Uber SEC filings showing West’s nine-figure annual compensation have explicitly highlighted the “regulatory progress” he had driven, helping prevent public efforts to classify Uber drivers as employees in general, and his work on California’s Prop 22 and similar initiatives in other states in particular. [9]

Kamala Harris, a Product of the Modern California Democratic Party

West took a leave of absence from Uber this past summer to help manage the Kamala Harris Presidential campaign. Aside from his business and DOJ experience, West is married to Maya Harris who ran her sister’s 2020 Presidential Campaign. The 2020 campaign attracted little public support but positioned Kamala Harris to become Joe Biden’s Vice-Presidential candidate.

Kamala Harris had been Attorney General of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011 and California Attorney General from 2011 to 2017 before filling the Senate seat vacated by Barbara Boxer. Tony West led her 2016 Senate transition team. Her career was closely intertwined with major California Democratic operatives including former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown (with whom she had been romantically involved with in the late 1990s and who helped jumpstart her political career by appointing her to several public positions), former Governor Jerry Brown and current Governor Gavin Newsom (who had succeeded Brown as Mayor of San Francisco and agreed to run for Governor in order to allow Harris to run for the Senate).

While the California Democratic establishment had a historical reputation as a liberal pro-working-class counterpoint to the Republicans’ strong business/libertarian orientation, its behavior began changing in the early 1980s.

California Democrats under Phil Burton, Tony Coelho and Nancy Pelosi became extremely focused on eliminating the huge Reagan era Republican fundraising advantage.  Coelho’s fundraising prowess and dedication to openly serve business interests allowed him to eclipse the power of Burton who wanted to balance a more traditional liberal legislative agenda with a stronger role for business interests. Pelosi not only proved skilled as a fundraiser but was a ruthless political infighter (her father had been Mayor of Baltimore), willing to marginalize and punish Democrats not fully supportive of the leadership’s fundraising objectives and the interests of donors.

Historically, political party operatives of all stripes shared an understanding that potentially sympathetic voters held diverse views and that winning elections required assembling coalitions of those diverse interests. That diversity also created a breeding ground that was critical to the long-run health of a party. It allowed younger politicians to test new policy ideas, rank and file organizing skills, and demonstrate they could handle competitive elections.

The fundraising focus meant younger, more policy and grassroots orientated Party supporters were often driven out and more “moderate” supporters could not develop needed political skills. Party insiders became more inbred and resistant to change in order to retain the status and perks of positions that no longer had anything to do with large scale political movements. Those operatives were part of a larger professional managerial class (PMC) whose members often worked for the companies and wealthy individuals who were major political donors and the Party became much more focused on PMC concerns.

Politicians like Burton may have hoped a new equilibrium accommodating both business interests and pro-worker policies under the Democratic tent might have emerged.

But once party insiders came to equate stronger fundraising with winning elections, the power of interests providing the funding grew steadily, as did the power of the operatives facilitating the flow of cash. Since the perceived amount of cash needed to win elections can grow indefinitely, the perceived need to cater to wealthy donors can also grow indefinitely.

One can argue that Obama tried to establish a different equilibrium by using his liberal background to keep traditional Democrats loyal while promising financial interests that he would not impose any serious constraints on them and would protect them from any liability for the Great Recession. But the demands for campaign cash and the demands from the oligarchic interests providing it kept growing. And few were attracted by the Democrats repositioning as “Republicans-lite”. [9]

Like a company or bureaucracy living on brand fumes, the Democratic party became dominated by career politicians who had totally bought into (and could help maintain) the central role of fundraising, had an inoffensive external persona, and said as little as possible about the concrete problems voters faced.

Harris and Newsom, who fit these requirements to a tee, were effectively chosen to become California’s Senator and Governor by the party’s aging establishment. Aside from time served in intermediate posts they had no political accomplishments that could explain their ascendancy. Harris was selected to run as Vice President in 2020 and to replace Biden as the Presidential candidate in 2024 over alternatives with similarly limited credentials via processes controlled by party insiders that ensured that voters were not given a choice of competitive candidates, and potential candidates never had to demonstrate that they could meet the challenge of difficult, adversarial campaigns.

West’s Role in His Sister-in-Law’s Presidential Campaign

West’s role in shaping Harris’ campaign is especially critical because very little was known about Harris’ policy views or priorities when she became the Democratic candidate. She had never been challenged in an election by a competitor with strong views, as Senator said as little as possible that might offend donors, and like most VPs never offered any policy views independent of the White House.

Under President Biden, areas such as foreign policy, job creation programs, immigration policy, financial regulation, environmental policy, competition and consumer protection policies were each dominated by factions with specific policy views but the overall result didn’t present a coherent vision to the electorate. Most factions felt they had some voice within the Administration, but many were uncomfortable with other Biden policies. Major Democratic donors were comfortable with some of those policies but not all of them.

Although most of the mainstream media failed to understand (or chose to ignore) its importance, Harris’ selection of Tony West as her key campaign advisor signaled that she had made a clear choice about her policy priorities. West aggressively worked his network of business contacts to help assure that the Democratic donor class supported her replacing Biden on the ticket and brought in Eric Holder to run the VP vetting process. West then pivoted to campaign financing, raising over $1.1 billion, 140% than Donald Trump needed to fund a much more successful campaign. [10]

One of the keys to West’s fundraising was quickly reaching out to major tech oligarchs, winning Harris endorsements from over 100 venture capitalists including Mark Cuban, Reid Hoffman and Reed Hastings who hosted a Harris fundraiser. Cuban said “I’ve had conversations with Tony and people on their team, and I find them very smart, very open to all business ideas,” Harris hosted corporate chief executives, including Karen Lynch of CVS, Ryan McInerney of Visa, Charles Phillips of Infor and Greg Brown of Motorola, at her Washington residence.

The business idea Harris’ donors pushed hardest was to fire FTC Chair Lina Khan and to reverse the Biden Administrations’ efforts to enforce antitrust law. After donating $10 million to the Harris campaign Hoffman (one of the founders of LinkedIn) said Khan is “waging war on American business” and that “I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace her.”  IAC Chairman Barry Diller, the former boss (at Expedia) of West’s current boss (Dara Khosrowshahi) called Khan “a dope” who was against “almost anything” business wants to do to grow efficiently. Harris hosted McInerney just after the Biden DOJ sued Visa for anticompetitive practices that it said had cost small businesses billions. Similarly, West brought in Paul, Weiss attorney Karen Dunn to lead Harris’ debate preparations at the same time she was defending Google against the DOJ’s adtech monopolization suit. [11]

Harris had never taken any public positions on Uber despite the enormous negative publicity and West’s role in the Kalanick era cover up and the company’s multi-year battle to nullify legislation reclassifying drivers as employees. But during the AB5 battles, asked if his controversial work for Uber caused “any dissent” at home with Sen. Harris or her sister, West said: “No.” [12]

Few mainstream media stories mentioned West’s prominent fundraising role in the Harris campaign. None mentioned his fight against drivers and regulators over AB5 or anything else done at Uber or his role in ensuring DOJ took virtually no actions against Wall Street after 2008.

Stories did mention that the donors West had been soliciting were aggressively lobbying Harris to reverse the Biden Administration antitrust/competition policies but never pressed the campaign as to whether those donors would get the major policy changes they wanted. Most accepted the donors’ framing of a conflict between “leftist” or “anti-business” and “pragmatic” economic policy without explaining that no one had offered a plausible compromise position and that the “pragmatic” policy was to give the donors everything they wanted.

Criticism of the donors was limited to suggesting that their blunt public demands may not have been tactically wise as it might have been easier for President Harris to reverse Biden’s policies if they could not be easily seen as the quid pro quo for campaign cash. All of the stories categorized advisors like West and Dunn, and donors like Cuban, Hoffman and Hastings as mainstream Democratic liberals. Some of the stories referenced the Trump vs Harris battle for large donations from billionaires and large corporations but none mentioned any linkage to the Trump vs Harris battle for voters frustrated with their declining economic position vis-à-vis financial elites. [13]

Tony West Played Extremely Similar Roles at Both Uber and the Harris Campaigns

In a narrow sense, West’s role at both Uber and the Harris campaign can be seen as highly successful. While it wasn’t the intended purpose, his cover-up of Kalanick era misdeeds allowed Uber’s Board to minimize extremely negative publicity. West’s battle against AB5 and other attempts to grant Uber’s drivers greater legal rights was critical to keeping Uber’s enormous losses from growing. Raising $1.1 billion for a campaign that no one had planned for was an unprecedented accomplishment, especially given the Republicans’ natural strength among corporations and very wealthy donors.

A broader perspective suggests West should be seen as extremely problematic, if not a major failure.

West was the third highest paid person at Uber, and one of the most important advisors to Kamala Harris but there is no way that West can be seen as a successful business or campaign leader. In West’s long tenure at Uber, under both Kalanick and Khosrowshahi, Uber lost staggering amounts of money and did not breakeven until its 15^th year of operations, and only after abandoning most of the things that had fueled its original growth and popularity. And needless to say, the Harris campaign’s massive warchest did nothing to help the candidate get elected.

Tony West played the exact same role at both Uber and the Harris campaign. He was utterly dedicated to serving the objectives of those with the real power (Uber’s investors, the Democratic Party leaders that had replaced Biden with Harris). He provided them with a genteel, polished public face that would distract the media from the dirty work at hand (covering up the Board’s complicity in Kalanick-era scandals, crushing widely supported efforts to limit the exploitation of “independent” drivers, handing wealthy oligarchs total effective control of the Democratic Party).

One of the major arguments of this series is that Uber represented the first time that techniques long used in partisan political battles were the basis for building a private company. Uber represents the breakthrough where investors found a way to create over $100 billion in equity value out of thin air and did so free of the constraints of economic fundamentals, market competition, legislatures concerned with workers and consumers or the enforcement of laws against predatory pricing and other exercises of artificial market power. [14] Since then, capital market valuations of very large companies have become almost completely unmoored from traditional economic/financial fundamentals and the wealth of investors in those companies has skyrocketed. As a result, the objectives of the large financial interests who are major political donors has also become more focused since the days when Burton or Obama could hope they could be loyal members of a liberal Democratic coalition.

These changes track major shifts in the worldview of the most powerful political donors. Understandings that business and politics were complex have been replaced with a narrower, simpler focus on money and control. Businesses, previously valorized when they found productivity breakthroughs that produced widespread public benefits are now only evaluated on the basis of equity appreciation for early investors. Competitive markets, previously valued because they ensured society gained from better resource allocation are now derided because competition would limit the artificial market power needed for unconstrained wealth accumulation. This erased the distinction between people who have accumulated wealth by developing powerful innovations and proving their worth in competitive markets and people who accumulate wealth by far easier means, such as capturing political processes in order to rig markets.

West’s work at Uber and the Harris campaign illustrates his dedication to the people holding this worldview. He reduced his work in both places to simple games (find returns for Uber investors; raise more cash than the Republicans) where determining the “winner” was a simple matter of counting the money.

In both cases it was critical to complete control of funding and the narratives used to describe the game. No one at Uber had any real-world business accomplishments and no one had any idea how the business model could ever produce sustainable profits, but since they controlled the $13 billion in external funding neither repeated scandals or $32 billion in losses could threaten their control. Anyone who attacked them (or pointed to the huge losses) was denigrated as a unrepentant unionist set on fighting the inevitable tide of technological progress.

Democratic Party insiders fiercely controlled funding even though they no longer had the ability to develop candidates who could win competitive elections or messages and policies with appeal outside elite/PMC circles. Worsening election results were blamed on to Russian interference and the failure of media companies to aggressively censor “misinformation”.

Uber subverted the idea that corporations served the larger economy through risky investments that produced meaningful productivity/efficiency advances whose value was demonstrated in competitive markets. It successfully convinced capital markets to ignore their total lack of competitiveness and profitability, and to only pay attention to their narratives about powerful technological innovation and Amazon-like growth potential.

California Party insiders abandoned the belief that Democrats should serve the concrete interests of a broad range of voters and needed to assemble a broad coalition of interests in order to win elections. The Harris campaign raised a billion dollars from companies and investors who were openly working to capture political processes so they could personally profit from market rigging and directly harm the many Democrats who benefitted from Biden Administration antitrust enforcement.

In both cases West fought until his patrons had achieved a total, irreversible victory. Throughout its history Uber fought tooth and nail, not just against traditional regulation, but to achieve totally unconstrained market power. It knew it could not make money in competitive markets and used extreme predatory pricing and political lobbying to ensure that passengers and drivers would never have competitive options. West was unwilling to compromise on any aspect of driver classification laws and spent hundreds of millions to ensure that the drivers and the California legislators and judges that had supported them were totally crushed in the AB5 battle.

Given this worldview it is not surprising that Biden Administration antitrust/competition policies were central to the fight for control over the Harris campaign, and even less surprising that Tony West handed the oligarchs demanding Lina Khan’s firing a complete victory. West was totally opposed to Biden’s attempts to maintain roles for different Democratc interests. While crucial to the future of the Democratic Party West ensured all decisions were made by insiders behind closed doors. Since Harris’ defeat there has been no evidence that there will be any reckoning for West or anyone else involved.

Financial interests captured much of the Republican Party long ago, even if the ascendancy of Donald Trump has complicated the nature of that control. Kamala Harris putting Tony West in charge of fundraising for her campaign was the unmistakable, flashing neon light signal that large donors now had full control of the Democratic Party. And not the somewhat diffuse financial interests that supported Clinton/Obama era neoliberalism, but the extremely wealthy big tech-oriented oligopoly interests dedicated to dismantling the last vestiges of constraints against extractive investors.

West’s successful sale of the Democratic Party to oligopoly interests has left it in total disarray and raises critical questions going future. Since Hilary Clinton’s loss in 2016 it has been openly questioned whether the Democratic Party leadership could attract support outside elite and PMC groups. It was widely understood that making a connection with non-elite groups was key to Trump’s rise. By making West and fundraising from billionaires the centerpiece of her campaign, Harris powerfully signaled that she had nothing of substance to say to non-elite non-PMC groups, and did not see maintaining the support of non-elite Democratic factions as important to the election. One can certainly argue that Trump might not produce the level of tangible benefits these voters might be hoping for, but Trump (via positions on immigration, household inflation impacts, attacks on elite claims, etc.) had strongly positioned himself as the candidate who cared the most about their problems. The Harris campaign simply conceded that huge advantage to Trump and never gave any indication it was concerned that advantage might have an impact on election results.

The Harris-West decision to ignore elite/non-elite issues and center the campaign on fundraising also helped ensure that it would be impossible for the national Democratic Party to recover from a Trump victory and establish any meaningful opposition to Trump policies. Some billionaire/corporate donors might have had some preference for a Democratic win, believing that (as with Obama) a this would neutralize opposition to pro-oligarchic policies from the left and offered more stability than a Trump victory. But the interest of the donors who contributed $1.1 billion to Harris was always purely transactional and (as events have proven) they rapidly switched their allegiance to Trump. So the national Democrats have absolutely no one that can serve as a plausible opponent to any Trump policies, the Party’s historic pro-working class branding has been destroyed, and the Party totally lacks the money and infrastructure needed to move forward.

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[1] Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Ten: The Uber Death Watch Begins, 15 Jun 2017

[2] Among many other articles documenting this behavior: Issac, Mike, Inside Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture, New York Times, 22 Feb 2017; Hook, Leslie, Uber: the crisis inside the ‘cult of Travis’, Financial Times, 9 Mar 2017 Fowler, Susan J., Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber, 19 Feb 2017

[3] O’Brien, Sara, Arianna Huffington: Sexual harassment isn’t a ‘systemic problem’ at Uber, CNNMoney, 23 Mar 2017. Huffington was the Uber Board member overseeing the West/Holder investigation.

[4] Swisher, Kara, A top Uber executive, who obtained the medical records of a customer who was a rape victim, has been fired, Recode, 7 Jun 2017.

[5] Michael Hiltzik, Pressure builds on Uber and Lyft under California’s gig worker law, Los Angeles Times, 3 July 2020; Steven Hill, Kamala Harris’s Uber Test, American Prospect 19 Aug 2020

[6] As previously documented in this series Uber had an ongoing program to produce “academic” papers supporting Uber narrative points that had not actually met minimal academic standards. Two of these papers specifically claimed that a majority of Uber drivers placed huge value in the scheduling flexibility that independent contacting provided but failed to demonstrate that they refected the views of drivers that provided the majority of Uber passenger trips and failed to demonstrate that Uber could not provide similarly valued schedule flexibility if drivers were reclassified as employees. Hubert Horan, Uber’s “Academic Research” Program: How to Use Famous Economists to Spread Corporate Narratives, ProMarket, 5 December 2019,

[7] —Uber’s market cap rose from $59.5bn in late October to $96.2bn in late November. Michelle Cheng, Uber’s market value has just reached an all-time high, Quartz, 6 Nov 2022 Dave Lee, Uber seeks to reassure investors over rising US regulatory threat, Financial Times, 6 May 2021

[8] Margot Roosevelt, Suhauna Hussain, Prop. 22 is ruled unconstitutional, a blow to California gig economy law, Los Angeles Times 20 Aug 2021

[9] Rebecca Rainey,  Chris Marr  Maia Spoto, Uber, Lyft Are Winning the Gig Worker War in States, Courts, Bloomberg Law 5 Aug 2024, Preetika Rana, Uber, Lyft Score Victory as California Court Affirms Right to Treat Drivers as Contractors, Wall Street Journal, 13 March 2023; Levi Sumagaysay, Uber CEO’s pay rose to $24 million last year, Market Watch 29 March 2023

[10] https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race

[11] Kate Kelly, Noam Scheiber and Kenneth P. Vogel, Harris’s Brother-in-Law, a Corporate Executive, Emerges as a Close Adviser, New York Times, 4 August 2024; Matt Egan, LinkedIn billionaire is going all-in on Kamala Harris. But he wants her to make a big change, cnn.com, 26 Jul 2024. Helaine Olen, This billionaire Democrat’s brazen suggestion puts Kamala Harris in a lose-lose situation, MSNBC 30 July 2024, Brooke Masters, James Fontanella-Khan, Harriet Agnew  and Lauren Fedor, Kamala Harris’s Wall Street charm offensive begins to pay off, Financial Times, 3 Oct 2024, Matt Stoller, The Rage of Google, Big, 11 Oct 2024. Karen Dunn had previously defended Uber after Waymo sued it for the theft of its robocar intellectual property and after New York City sued it for violation congestion laws.

[12] Carolyn Said, Facing AB5, Uber’s Tony West discusses improving drivers’ lot, San Francisco Chronicle 13 July 2019, Steven Hill, Kamala Harris’s Uber Test, American Prospect 19 Aug 2020

[13] Andrew Duehren and Lauren Hirsch, How Wall St. Is Subtly Shaping the Harris Economic Agenda, 14 Oct 2024 Lauren Hirsch and Sarah Kessler, Saying the Quiet Part Out Loud, New York Times, 3 August 2024

[14] Perhaps best summarized in “Uber’s Path of Destruction” American Affairs, vol 3, no 2, Summer 2019, pp.108-133. https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-destruction/