50 Fun Facts About Uber

In which city is Uber headquartered?

Since 2021 its home has been a cluster of 6- and 11-storey buildings linked by bridges in Mission Bay.

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

The company dropped the last syllable in 2011 after complaints from taxicab operators in its home city.

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

He and Kalanick had just paid $800 for a private driver on New Year's Eve, and he had also struggled to find a taxi on a snowy night in Paris.

The founders spent how much on a New Year's Eve private driver, which they deemed excessive?

The prototype app was built by the idea's originator with friends Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan; Kalanick was the 'mega advisor'.

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

He was named CEO in May 2010 and became chief operating officer when Kalanick succeeded him that December.

What kind of vehicle could Uber's earliest users summon when the app launched publicly in 2011?

Rides cost roughly 1.5 times a taxi fare; Kalanick did not believe ordinary cars driven by amateurs would appeal to anyone.

What was the cheaper option, launched in July 2012, that let drivers use non-luxury vehicles?

Drivers still needed commercial licences until April 2013, when Uber copied rivals and opened the platform to regular drivers with personal cars.

Which company, called the world's first rideshare company, did Kalanick publicly say was illegal and would not work?

Only after it, Lyft and Sidecar won licences in 2013 did Uber adopt the same model of amateur drivers in their own cars.

Which volunteer LGBTQ ride service is credited as the inspiration for letting regular drivers offer rides?

Former Uber executive Andrew Chen and Sidecar's co-founder both point to it as the model.

Uber's food delivery business began in August 2014 in Santa Monica under what name?

By 2020 Uber Eats was the company's second-largest revenue source behind rides.

Uber sold its China operations in 2016 to which company, in exchange for an 18% stake?

Uber had operated in China under the name Yōubù; the buyer also agreed to invest $1bn in Uber.

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

The same year it folded its Russian and Central Asian operations into Yandex Taxi.

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

Founder Anthony Levandowski had come from the Google spin-off; Uber paid $625m for his company and later settled.

Who replaced Travis Kalanick as CEO of Uber in August 2017?

He came from Expedia, where two years earlier he had led an equity investment in the very first rideshare company.

Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's CEO since 2017, was born in which country?

He fled as a child on the eve of the 1979 revolution; his family's Alborz Investment Company was nationalised after they left in 1978, and he later graduated from Brown University.

In which year did Uber go public?

The IPO came the same spring as driver strikes over pay in several countries, and after years of multibillion-dollar losses.

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

The same month it sold its Indian Uber Eats business to a local rival in exchange for a stake.

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

It still runs as a separate brand; a year later Uber bought the alcohol delivery service Drizly, then shut it down in 2024.

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

In 2025 the two announced air taxi and seaplane flights together in certain markets.

Uber's self-driving unit ATG was sold to which company in January 2021 for $4bn in equity?

Uber also put $400m into the buyer; SoftBank, Toyota and Denso had been minority owners of the unit.

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

It used geofencing, credit card mining and social media to spot officials in cities where Uber was illegal; London cited it when refusing to renew Uber's licence.

What was the codename of Uber's 'panic button' that locked office computers during raids?

Bloomberg reported it was used at least 24 times between 2015 and 2016; Uber said no data was permanently deleted.

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

Former attorney general Eric Holder led the resulting investigation; over 20 employees were fired and Kalanick resigned within months.

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

The breach exposed data on 57 million customers and 600,000 drivers; the security chief was later charged with obstruction of justice.

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

Inside the code repository they found keys to Uber's Amazon Web Services storage and more than 100 S3 buckets.

How much did Uber pay in 2018 to settle the multi-state case over concealing that breach?

It was the largest multi-state data-breach settlement to that point; Britain's regulator added a fine of its own.

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

The 124,000 documents showed lobbying of Biden, Scholz and Osborne, secret help from a French minister, and use of a kill switch in police raids.

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

He was economy minister at the time; the files ran from 2012 to 2017.

Which 2020 California ballot measure exempted ride-hailing firms from treating drivers as employees?

Uber had announced it simply would not comply with AB5, then spent tens of millions on the campaign to overturn it.

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

New Zealand, Switzerland, New Jersey and the Netherlands have reached similar conclusions.

How much did Uber agree to pay 8,000 Australian taxi drivers to settle a class action?

In the United States, by contrast, Uber won every taxi lawsuit, including the only one to reach trial.

In 2021 Uber was ordered to pay $1.1m to a blind passenger refused rides how many times?

Lisa Irving travels with a guide dog; refusing service animals breaks the Americans with Disabilities Act.

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

It had already fined Uber €10m earlier that year over unclear terms on how long driver data was kept.

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

The $9.99-a-month service was also accused of making cancellation deliberately hard; 21 states later joined the case.

In which year did Uber post its first ever operating profit?

That was fourteen years after its founding and four after its IPO.

By which year has Uber committed to being carbon neutral globally?

In most countries it also requires rides to be offered only in electric vehicles by 2030.

As of 2026, roughly how many trips and delivery orders did Uber coordinate per day?

At that point it counted over 200m monthly active users and about 10m active drivers and couriers across some 70 countries.

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

Uber has also bought Lucid Gravity vehicles and partnered with Nvidia to run its self-driving software.

Which European meal-ordering giant did Uber agree to acquire for $14.8bn in July 2026?

A year earlier it had bought 85% of Istanbul-based Trendyol Go and Denmark's largest taxi firm, DanTaxi.

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

Uber took a roughly 10% stake in the buyer as part of the deal.

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

At 18 he started a test-prep business, then dropped out of UCLA to join the file-sharing startup Scour.

Kalanick's file-sharing startup Scour collapsed in 2000 after an industry lawsuit for how much?

He called his next company, Red Swoosh, his 'revenge business' against the MPAA and RIAA.

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

The series is based on Mike Isaac's book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber; Jon Bass played the co-founder who had the original idea.

Which ghost-kitchen business did Kalanick build after Uber, folded into robotics company Atoms in 2026?

He announced it after a $150 million investment in City Storage Systems, a distressed real-estate redeveloper he also ran.

In which Canadian city was Uber's idea man born and educated?

He studied electrical engineering at the University of Calgary before co-founding StumbleUpon, which eBay bought in 2007.

Which newspaper named Uber its tech company of the year in December 2013, when it operated in 65 cities?

Four years later the company was operating in around 15,000 cities.

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

Its playbook was to launch first on a loose reading of local rules, then lobby to change them.

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

It was one of a string of pandemic-era delivery acquisitions alongside Postmates and Cornershop.

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

Uber invested $225 million in the venture, which covered Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia and Kazakhstan.

Under its 2020 climate pledge, Uber said rides in most countries must be exclusively in electric vehicles by which year?

The same commitment set a target of global carbon neutrality a decade later.