Wild Ride

ADAM LASHINSKY is the executive editor of Fortune, editorial director of the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, and co-chair of the Fortune Global Forum. He wrote the 2012 New York Times bestseller Inside Apple, and he appears regularly on Fox News. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

"Adam Lashinsky is one of the most insightful, enterprising, and energetic reporters covering technology in America today. He's always a joy to read."
-WALTER ISAACSON, author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators

"In Silicon Valley, no company is more ambitious, audacious, or annoying than Uber. Adam Lashinsky's insightful book, brimming with comments and confessions from CEO Travis Kalanick, would be worth reading even at surge pricing."
-STEVEN LEVY, author of Hackers and In the Plex

"Adam Lashinsky chronicles Uber's rise from scrappy start-up to global giant with aplomb. It's an epic story in itself, but Lashinsky's insight and extensive reporting guarantee that it's a valuable read as well."
-BETHANY MCLEAN, author of All the Devils Are Here and The Smartest Guys in the Room

"Wild Ride is the unprecedented story of Uber and its ruthless and visionary CEO Travis Kalanick. No new company has ever grown larger faster. Lashinsky captures Uber's epic ambitions with extraordinary access and keen judgment. It's a must read for everyone interested in business, technology, and the future."
-JOHN DOERR, chairman of Kleiner Perkins

"With the eye of a fine journalist and the ear of a mordant humorist, Adam Lashinsky has nailed the formative ingredients which gave rise to the four-letter word known around the world-'Uber.'"
-MICHAEL MORITZ, partner at Sequoia Capital

"Just a few pages into Wild Ride you can see why the insanely talented Adam Lashinsky is one of the most respected business journalists around today. Lashinsky takes you behind the many layers of tumult and ambition that created one of Silicon Valley's most controversial and disruptive juggernauts, Uber, and the company's insatiable, and often frightening, quest to win."
-NICK BILTON, author of American Kingpin and Hatching Twitter

Chapter 1 A Wild Ride Through China Travis Kalanick sits in the back of a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes making its way through the traffic-clogged streets of Beijing. It is the dead of summer in 2016, and the sky above the Chinese capital is thick with pollution, the air muggy and still. As CEO of Uber, the world's most valuable start-up, Kalanick has been visiting China about every three months for three years now. All the travel from his home base in San Francisco is part of a money-draining and quixotic gambit to replicate the global success of Uber's disruptive ride-hailing service in the world's most populous country. Kalanick has spent the previous three days in Tianjin, a megacity on the Yellow Sea, two hours southeast of Beijing. There he was a cochair of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) New Champions meeting, the so-called summer Davos. Weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, Kalanick was the toast of Tianjin, where he enjoyed the considerable fringe benefits of his newfound worldwide prominence. The California start-up he runs has been around a mere six years, yet at the off-season international gabfest he scored an audience with the second most powerful government official in China, Premier Li Keqiang. Kalanick appeared on WEF panels moderated by Western and Chinese broadcasters, gamely attempted to flip a traditional pancake over an intimate dinner with the managers responsible for Uber's local operations in Tianjin, and huddled with his entrepreneurial peers. Among them was Lei Jun, founder of the highly valued Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. Lei's penchant for bold claims and his company's controversial business model of selling ultracheap phones make him as notorious in China as Kalanick is everywhere else. Already, Kalanick's trip is a success, judged at least through the prism of the image-enhancing mentions he has racked up in the Chinese and international press. Li, the Chinese premier and an outspoken promoter of entrepreneurialism in China, called Kalanick a "pioneer." He said this in English, a flattering flourish and tidbit the Uber CEO's China-based minions dutifully fed to the local press. Indeed, Kalanick's every utterance on this trip is making headlines. Asked during a WEF fireside chat if self-driving vehicles would make the human-driven kind obsolete, Kalanick threw off one of his signature and controversial one-liners that combined insouciance, boastfulness, and don't-mess-with-me humor. "You might own a car like maybe some people own a horse," he deadpanned in front of an admiring audience. "You know, you might take a ride on the weekends or something." As he leaves Tianjin and in the privacy of his human-driven vehicle on the road to Beijing, however, his cocky good cheer gives way to prickly tension. In fact, Kalanick has a full-blown crisis on his hands. He joins a conference call with a team of Uber executives in three countries on two continents. A team of communications executives dials in from San Francisco. Others call from Seoul, South Korea. Two executives are in the car with Kalanick, both critical to Uber's Asian ambitions. One is Emil Michael, Uber's chief business officer and the CEO's all-purpose right-hand man, to whom on this very trip Kalanick has delegated the role of engaging in high-stakes and secretive negotiations to sell Uber's China business to its chief rival, Didi Chuxing. The other is Liu Zhen, the head of strategy for Uber China and its best-known Chinese employee. Liu is also a first cousin of Jean Liu, the former Goldman Sachs banker who is president of Didi and whose father founded the computer behemoth Lenovo. The purpose of the call is to discuss whet