49 Fun Facts About Uber

In which city is Uber headquartered?

San Francisco's oldest cab company, DeSoto, rebranded as Flywheel and sued Uber for predatory pricing in 2016, but a federal judge threw out most of the case.

What was Uber originally called when it was founded in 2009?

UberCab dropped 'Cab' after city and state regulators ordered it to cease and desist as an unlicensed taxi service, and it kept operating anyway.

Which co-founder of StumbleUpon came up with the idea for Uber?

Garrett Camp was partly inspired by struggling to find a taxi on a snowy night in Paris, during a 2008 trip with Travis Kalanick.

What does Uber call the higher fares it charges when rider demand outstrips available drivers?

Surge pricing sent Sydney fares soaring during the 2014 cafe siege; after angry replies, Uber made rides out of the city centre free and refunded riders.

Who was Uber's first employee, briefly its CEO in 2010 before Kalanick took over?

Ryan Graves landed the job by replying 'here's a tip' to a Kalanick tweet seeking a product and business-development hire, then tweeting his email address.

What could riders summon when Uber's app first launched?

Only black luxury cars at first, booked through licensed limo firms, but Uber let everyday drivers join once cheaper rideshare rivals emerged.

Which Uber service, launched in July 2012, was priced about 35% below its original rides?

UberX drivers still needed commercial licences until April 2013, when Uber began adding everyday drivers in their own cars to match rideshare rivals.

Which former Obama White House adviser became Uber's head of policy and strategy in 2014?

David Plouffe was fined $90,000 in 2017 by Chicago's ethics board for lobbying Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Uber's behalf without registering.

In 2018, an Uber self-driving test car killed a pedestrian in which US state?

Arizona's governor suspended Uber's self-driving tests after the Tempe crash, and police said the backup driver had been streaming The Voice on Hulu.

Which city's transport authority refused to renew Uber's licence in 2017, citing public safety and security?

London: after Uber appealed, a court in 2018 granted it a 15-month licence on probation, with conditions the regulator would monitor.

Uber sold its China business in 2016 to which Chinese company, in exchange for a stake?

DiDi's deal ended a costly battle in which Uber had lost more than $2 billion, and DiDi also invested $1 billion in Uber.

Uber merged its Southeast Asian business into which company in 2018, taking a 27.5% stake?

Grab and Uber were fined about S$13 million in total by Singapore's competition watchdog, which also ordered Grab to end its exclusive taxi-fleet deals.

Uber's 2016 purchase of self-driving truck startup Ottomotto led to a trade-secrets lawsuit with which company?

Waymo accused Otto's founder of taking confidential files from Google's self-driving project; Uber settled by giving Waymo about $245 million in Uber shares.

Who did Uber's board pick to succeed Travis Kalanick as CEO in August 2017?

Dara Khosrowshahi was a surprise pick: finalists Meg Whitman and Jeff Immelt had been known contenders for weeks, while his candidacy stayed secret.

The man who became Uber's CEO in 2017 fled which country as a boy, on the eve of its revolution?

Iran: after his family fled in 1978, the new government seized their conglomerate, and he grew up in New York state.

Which US rival went public in March 2019, weeks before Uber's own stock market debut?

Lyft listed in March 2019; days before Uber's own listing that May, drivers for both apps walked out worldwide in protest at low pay.

Which Middle Eastern ride-hailing company did Uber buy for $3.1bn in January 2020?

Careem was split in 2023, when UAE telecom giant e& took a majority of its super app business while Uber kept Careem's ride-hailing arm.

Which US delivery rival did Uber buy for $2.65bn in December 2020?

Postmates was agreed to less than a month after Uber's bid for Grubhub fell through, as Just Eat Takeaway won Grubhub instead.

Uber sold its flying-taxi division, Elevate, to which company in December 2020?

Joby Aviation took over Elevate in what both firms called an expanded partnership, and Uber invested a further $75 million in Joby.

Uber's self-driving unit ATG went to which company in January 2021, in a deal valuing it at about $4bn?

Aurora Innovation also got $400 million from Uber, which took a 26% stake, keeping a hand in self-driving tech it had stopped building itself.

What was 'Greyball', revealed by The New York Times in 2017?

Greyball was a tool to deny officials rides by showing them ghost cars; once it was exposed, Uber vowed to stop using it that way.

What did Uber's secret 'Ripley' system do when authorities raided its offices?

Ripley locked staff computers remotely; it was named for the Alien heroine and her line about nuking the entire site from orbit.

Whose 2017 blog post on harassment at Uber set off the crisis that felled Kalanick?

Susan Fowler's post set off outside investigations, after which Uber fired more than 20 employees in June 2017.

How did Uber disguise the $100k ransom it paid hackers after its 2016 data breach?

Uber booked it as a 'bug bounty' payment, and the hackers signed nondisclosure agreements falsely saying they had taken no data.

How did the 2016 hackers get into Uber's systems?

A cloud log-in found on GitHub opened Uber's Amazon Web Services storage, from which the hackers downloaded unencrypted files.

How much did Uber pay in 2018 to settle with 50 US states over hiding its 2016 data breach?

$148 million settled the states' case; when Uber revealed the breach, it fired security chief Joe Sullivan and one of his deputies.

The 2022 'Uber Files' were leaked by which former lobbyist to The Guardian?

Mark MacGann's leak prompted Uber to say its past behaviour was not in line with its present values and that it had changed since 2017.

Which French leader was revealed by the Uber Files to have secretly aided the company's lobbying?

Emmanuel Macron, then economy minister, later said he was proud to have backed Uber and would do it again.

Which California ballot measure let ride-hailing firms keep treating drivers as contractors, not employees?

Proposition 22 was ruled unconstitutional by a county judge in 2021, but the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld it in 2024.

Which country's Supreme Court ruled in Uber BV v Aslam that the company's drivers are workers?

After losing in the United Kingdom, Uber promised drivers the minimum wage and holiday pay, but counted only time spent on trips.

Uber agreed in 2024 to pay how much to settle a class action by over 8,000 Australian taxi drivers?

AU$271.8 million settled claims by taxi and hire car drivers that Uber's alleged illegal operation cost them income.

What led Uber drivers to keep refusing Lisa Irving, who won $1.1m from Uber in 2021?

Her guide dog led to 14 refusals, and the arbitrator rejected Uber's defence that its drivers were independent contractors.

Which authority fined Uber €290m in 2024 for sending EU drivers' data to US servers?

The Dutch privacy regulator took up the complaint of more than 170 French drivers because Uber's European headquarters is in the Netherlands.

In 2025 the FTC sued Uber over allegedly enrolling customers without consent in which subscription?

Uber One cost up to $9.99 a month, and the FTC said Uber made it unreasonably hard to cancel despite promising 'cancel anytime'.

What could riders request with Uber Green, part of Uber's 2020 climate pledge?

A hybrid or electric car could be booked through Uber Green, part of an $800 million plan to help drivers switch to EVs by 2025.

What did Anthony Levandowski, whose trucking startup Uber bought, receive in January 2021?

A full presidential pardon cleared him after he had pleaded guilty to one criminal count of stealing self-driving trade secrets.

Which EV maker agreed in 2026 to supply up to 50,000 robotaxis to Uber, backed by a $1.25bn Uber investment?

Rivian shares jumped about 10% in premarket trading on the news, with Uber paying $300 million up front.

Which European meal-ordering giant did Uber agree to take over in July 2026?

Delivery Hero will sell its business in 14 markets where Uber Eats already operates to SSW Partners, to head off competition concerns.

Which Indian company bought Uber Eats' Indian business in January 2020?

Zomato paid in shares, leaving Uber with a 9.99% stake as it shed a loss-making unit.

What did teenage Travis Kalanick sell door-to-door before he ever founded a company?

Cutco knives were his teenage trade, and in 1998 he dropped out of UCLA to work full-time at the startup Scour.

Kalanick called his post-Scour startup Red Swoosh a 'revenge business' because he wanted whom as customers?

Firms that sued Scour, from film studios to record labels, were meant to pay Red Swoosh to deliver files; Akamai bought it in 2007.

Who played Travis Kalanick in the 2022 Showtime series Super Pumped?

Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Uber season had not even premiered when Showtime renewed the anthology for a second season about Facebook.

Which ghost-kitchen startup did Travis Kalanick run after he was pushed out as Uber's boss?

CloudKitchens rents kitchens to delivery-only restaurants and came with Kalanick's takeover of its parent, City Storage Systems.

After a 2017 video showed him arguing with an Uber driver over fares, what did Kalanick admit he needed?

Leadership help, he told staff in an email, saying he was ashamed and had to fundamentally change as a leader and grow up.

Uber paid $20 million in 2017 to settle US regulators' claims that it had exaggerated what?

How much drivers could earn was overstated, the FTC said, as Uber pitched hourly pay that few of its drivers actually made.

Uber was fined $11.4m in 2016 for operating without permission in which US state?

Pennsylvania's utility regulator made that fine a record, while a rival that also launched without state approval had settled for $250,000.

Which alcohol delivery service did Uber buy for $1.1 billion in 2021, only to shut it down in early 2024?

Drizly ran on its own for three years before Uber closed it and folded alcohol delivery into the Uber Eats app.

In 2018 Uber merged its operations in Russia and five neighbouring countries with which company's taxi arm?

Yandex took over Uber's rides in Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan, and bought out Uber's stake in 2023.

In January 2017, Uber was accused of undercutting a taxi drivers' strike against Trump's travel ban at which airport?

JFK in New York was where the strike took place, and anger at Uber's response set off the #DeleteUber campaign as users cancelled their accounts.