For Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the mystery of Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick wasn’t about how he lost the reins of the ride-share company. It was about why he put the pedal to the metal at all.
“Super Pumped: The Battle For Uber,” which premiered Sunday on Showtime and is based on Mike Isaac’s book of the same name, drives alongside its ambitious CEO through the trials and tribulations of a Silicon Valley startup, all the way through Kalanick’s 2017 ousting in a boardroom coup.
The story of Uber, like so many other heady dreams, is one that burned too bright, taken down by greed or ambition or corporate overlords. So Gordon-Levitt focused on the star at the center.
“I wanted to know how it felt, what he was really like,” the 41-year-old actor told the Daily News. “What I found when I talked to people was how much, despite his questionable behavior and arguably unethical decisions, people really liked him. He was very winning and got people on his side in a lot of ways.”
By the time Kalanick was voted out of his own company, stories of the bro culture, punctuated by allegations of rampant sexual harassment, were commonplace, tucked into every glowing article about how Uber was changing the face of transportation. In “Super Pumped,” both can be true: Kalanick was a genius and also, by his own admission, an “a—hole.”
“Oftentimes, being honest gets interpreted as being an a—hole, because we do live in a culture where you kind of walk on eggshells and you tiptoe around and you can’t tell somebody if there’s a problem. And if you do directly tell somebody that there’s a problem, they’re like, ‘what an a—hole!’” Gordon-Levitt said.
“That’s the upside of what Travis is saying: when he’s saying ‘are you an a—hole?’ he’s saying ‘are you going to be honest? Are you going to get to the heart of the problem and not walk on eggshells?’ I think there’s a real upside to that. The problem is you get these folks who do that to the exclusion of caring about the other people involved. You can do both. I really think you can do both. But you have all these examples of people who are only doing one and even though they’re only doing one, they succeed because they’re being honest.”
For a while, Kalanick succeeded. He raised millions in capital — much from venture capitalist Bill Gurley, played in “Super Pumped” by Kyle Chandler — and grew Uber out of San Francisco into New York, Chicago, Canada and Europe. He fended off attacks with the help of writer and businesswoman Ariana Huffington, played by Uma Thurman. He was the model Silicon Valley guy, in the best and worst ways.
Kalanick was great at playing the game, Gordon-Levitt said. The problem is the game he was playing.
“Why is ‘win at all costs, profit above all,’ why is that what we want? Is that really helping us? I think it’s probably doing more harm than good,” he told The News.
“The human race is about to drive off a cliff if we can’t save this, if we don’t say there are things that matter other than shareholder value. We need to have companies that are looking at the benefit of everybody, that are looking at the future, things that currently our economy just doesn’t measure. There’s no way to win by succeeding at that.”
Uber was about making transportation accessible. Theranos wanted to simplify blood tests. Facebook, after it pivoted from ranking hot college girls, opened up communication around the world. They all wanted to do good, Gordon-Levitt said. But the goal always changes.
“You can have the best intentions you want, but if what you have to do is just make money, then your intentions are only going to go so far,” Gordon-Levitt told The News.
“That’s not Uber’s fault. That’s the larger system’s fault.”
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