Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Cue hammered Kalanick from the start. “We want you to walk us through exactly what happened here, from the beginning how we ended up in this room today.” Kalanick stammered, shaken, but started from the beginning. He walked Cue and Schiller through the massive fraud across the platform, through the ingenious solutions scammers had and the problems Apple’s iOS updates had created for halting fraud. Emil Michael, the point person for dealing with Cue and the Apple blowup, had prepped Kalanick well. Kalanick was trying on a new face for this meeting, one of conciliatory regret. He knew he could get away with telling the government and city authorities to kiss his ass. However, on rare occasions, he could sense he needed to humble himself. It almost never happened. But here, at Apple HQ, in front of its top brass—he kissed the ring. “We want to hear you commit to us,” Cue said to Kalanick, as the group wrapped up the long, tense meeting. “We want to know you will never, ever do this again. Make this promise, or you’re gone, you’re out.” Cue meant business. He had brought the matter to his boss, Tim Cook, and both of them considered this a serious infraction. No one, no matter how successful the app or company, could lie to Apple and get away with it. For Cook, there was no greater sin than breaching the privacy of his users. Cook would later fight the FBI in public, refusing to unlock the smartphone of a mass murderer in San Bernardino, and would slam Facebook at public events...