‘It’s kind of a tragedy’: behind the battle for power at Uber
In dark jacket, grey sweater and white undershirt, Travis Kalanick was relaxed in comfy chair, coffee mug before him, shooting the breeze with late-night TV host Stephen Colbert. Then came a cry from the studio audience.
“Shame! Respect drivers’ labour! Respect professional full-time work!” The camera picked out a T-shirt-wearing protester who, standing and cupping his hands to his mouth, yelled: “Uber exploits taxi drivers for profit and kills professional full-time work in the taxi industry!”
Colbert asked the man to sit down and joked to Uber co-founder Kalanick: “That’s my cousin. I apologise.”
This September 2015 incident – a rare moment when a king of the gig economy was confronted by one his powerless subjects – was not broadcast at the time, but finally aired on CBS last month, when Colbert interviewed actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt about playing Kalanick on the small screen.
Super Pumped: the Battle for Uber is the story of how Kalanick led the fastest-growing startup in history, taking on incumbent taxi industries in San Francisco, America and the world. It is a compelling portrayal of a man who is in turns charming and obnoxious, genius and crazy, superhero and supervillain, and who gives new meaning to the word “disrupter”.
It is also a glimpse of a tech industry where there is a thin line between creation and destruction and bad boys such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey are criticised for moving fast and breaking things with little regard for who gets hurt.
Beth Schacter, an executive producer of Super Pumped, told a recent Washington Post Live event: “They’re kind of modern kings, and in that Shakespearean way of wanting to examine what makes a king and what brings a king
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