“Are you an asshole?” This query is on the docket of questions Uber founder Travis Kalanick asks would-be “Uberettos” – his cloying pet name for employees at the ride-sharing behemoth. And it’s not exactly rhetorical. Travis likes assholes. It takes an asshole, apparently, to disrupt the status quo, move fast, break things, get stuff done, fail fast, fail often – insert your tech-bro bombast of choice here. Assholes, to Travis, are very effective people.
That he has a contrarian streak deeper than Silicon Valley’s San Andreas fault line tells you all you need to know about the man who broke open the taxi business only to be ousted from his throne following allegations of sexual harassment against the company in 2017. “Are you an asshole?” is among the first things he utters on Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, a brazen new Paramount+ series about the CEO’s dizzying rise and calamitous fall. Hearing it, I thought of the advice Maya Angelou famously gave Oprah: “When people show you who they are, believe them.”
