50 free Uber trivia questions with answers — technology quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Uber began as UberCab, a way to summon a black car after two friends paid $800 for a New Year's Eve driver, and grew into a company that moves 42 million trips and deliveries a day. This quiz covers the rise: Garrett Camp's idea, Ryan Graves as employee number one, UberX and the amateur-driver model borrowed from rivals, the China retreat to DiDi, Uber Eats, the 2019 IPO and the acquisitions from Careem to Postmates to Delivery Hero. It also covers the trouble: Greyball and the Ripley kill switch, Susan Fowler's blog post and Kalanick's fall, the hidden 2016 breach and its $148 million settlement, the Uber Files and Macron, Proposition 22, the UK Supreme Court, the guide-dog case and the Dutch privacy fines, plus the newer chapters of robotaxis, air taxis and the first profit. It suits business-news readers, tech-quiz nights and anyone who has ever argued about surge pricing. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Uber, Uber Eats and the founders, and each question shows its supporting sentence after you answer.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city is Uber headquartered?
San Francisco
Since 2021 its home has been a cluster of 6- and 11-storey buildings linked by bridges in Mission Bay.
Q 02What was Uber originally called when it was founded in 2009?
UberCab
The company dropped the last syllable in 2011 after complaints from taxicab operators in its home city.
Q 03Which co-founder of StumbleUpon came up with the idea for Uber?
Garrett Camp
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.
Q 04The founders spent how much on a New Year's Eve private driver, which they deemed excessive?
$800
The prototype app was built by the idea's originator with friends Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan; Kalanick was the 'mega advisor'.
Q 05Who was Uber's first employee, briefly its CEO in 2010 before Kalanick took over?
Ryan Graves
He was named CEO in May 2010 and became chief operating officer when Kalanick succeeded him that December.
Q 06What kind of vehicle could Uber's earliest users summon when the app launched publicly in 2011?
Only black luxury cars
Rides cost roughly 1.5 times a taxi fare; Kalanick did not believe ordinary cars driven by amateurs would appeal to anyone.
Q 07What was the cheaper option, launched in July 2012, that let drivers use non-luxury vehicles?
UberX
Drivers still needed commercial licences until April 2013, when Uber copied rivals and opened the platform to regular drivers with personal cars.
Q 08Which company, called the world's first rideshare company, did Kalanick publicly say was illegal and would not work?
Wingz
Only after it, Lyft and Sidecar won licences in 2013 did Uber adopt the same model of amateur drivers in their own cars.
Q 09Which volunteer LGBTQ ride service is credited as the inspiration for letting regular drivers offer rides?
Homobiles
Former Uber executive Andrew Chen and Sidecar's co-founder both point to it as the model.
Q 10Uber's food delivery business began in August 2014 in Santa Monica under what name?
UberFRESH
By 2020 Uber Eats was the company's second-largest revenue source behind rides.
Q 11Uber sold its China operations in 2016 to which company, in exchange for an 18% stake?
DiDi
Uber had operated in China under the name Yōubù; the buyer also agreed to invest $1bn in Uber.
Q 12Uber merged its Southeast Asian business into which company in 2018, taking a 27.5% stake?
Grab
The same year it folded its Russian and Central Asian operations into Yandex Taxi.
Q 13Uber's 2016 purchase of self-driving truck startup Ottomotto led to a trade-secrets lawsuit with which company?
Waymo
Founder Anthony Levandowski had come from the Google spin-off; Uber paid $625m for his company and later settled.
Q 21What was 'Greyball', revealed by The New York Times in 2017?
A tool to dodge police riders
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.
Q 22What was the codename of Uber's 'panic button' that locked office computers during raids?
Ripley
Bloomberg reported it was used at least 24 times between 2015 and 2016; Uber said no data was permanently deleted.
Q 23Whose 2017 blog post on harassment at Uber set off the crisis that felled Kalanick?
Susan Fowler
Q 14Who replaced Travis Kalanick as CEO of Uber in August 2017?
Dara Khosrowshahi
He came from Expedia, where two years earlier he had led an equity investment in the very first rideshare company.
Q 15Dara Khosrowshahi, Uber's CEO since 2017, was born in which country?
Iran
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.
Q 16In which year did Uber go public?
2019
The IPO came the same spring as driver strikes over pay in several countries, and after years of multibillion-dollar losses.
Q 17Which Middle Eastern ride-hailing company did Uber buy for $3.1bn in January 2020?
Careem
The same month it sold its Indian Uber Eats business to a local rival in exchange for a stake.
Q 18Which US delivery rival did Uber buy for $2.65bn in December 2020?
Postmates
It still runs as a separate brand; a year later Uber bought the alcohol delivery service Drizly, then shut it down in 2024.
Q 19Uber sold its flying-taxi division, Elevate, to which company in December 2020?
Joby Aviation
In 2025 the two announced air taxi and seaplane flights together in certain markets.
Q 20Uber's self-driving unit ATG was sold to which company in January 2021 for $4bn in equity?
Aurora Innovation
Uber also put $400m into the buyer; SoftBank, Toyota and Denso had been minority owners of the unit.
Former attorney general Eric Holder led the resulting investigation; over 20 employees were fired and Kalanick resigned within months.
Q 24How did Uber disguise the $100k ransom it paid hackers after its 2016 data breach?
As a 'bug bounty' payment
The breach exposed data on 57 million customers and 600,000 drivers; the security chief was later charged with obstruction of justice.
Q 25How did the 2016 hackers get into Uber's systems?
Reused passwords on a private GitHub repo
Inside the code repository they found keys to Uber's Amazon Web Services storage and more than 100 S3 buckets.
Q 26How much did Uber pay in 2018 to settle the multi-state case over concealing that breach?
$148 million
It was the largest multi-state data-breach settlement to that point; Britain's regulator added a fine of its own.
Q 27The 2022 'Uber Files' were leaked by which former lobbyist to The Guardian?
Mark MacGann
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.
Q 28Which French leader was revealed by the Uber Files to have secretly aided the company's lobbying?
Emmanuel Macron
He was economy minister at the time; the files ran from 2012 to 2017.
Q 29Which 2020 California ballot measure exempted ride-hailing firms from treating drivers as employees?
Proposition 22
Uber had announced it simply would not comply with AB5, then spent tens of millions on the campaign to overturn it.
Q 30Which country's Supreme Court ruled in Aslam v Uber BV that drivers are workers?
The United Kingdom
New Zealand, Switzerland, New Jersey and the Netherlands have reached similar conclusions.