#travis kalanick

Robert Reich at Substack:

Friends, Elon Musk and entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret billionaire dinner party in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and reinstall Donald Trump in the White House. The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.

Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on his X platform. According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about President Biden at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden's age to his policies on heath and immigration, calling Biden "a tragic front for a far left political machine.” The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases Trump now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias. This is no small matter. Musk has 184 million followers on X, and because he owns the platform he’s able to manipulate the algorithm to maximize the number of people who see his posts.

No other leader of a social media firm has gone as far as Musk in supporting authoritarian leaders around the world. In addition to Trump, Musk has used his platform in support of India's Narendra Modi, Argentina's Javier Milei, and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.  Some of this helps Musk’s business interests. In India, he has secured lower import tariffs for Tesla vehicles. In Brazil, he has opened a major new market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service. In Argentina, he has solidified access to lithium, the mineral most crucial to Tesla’s batteries. Musk has slammed Biden for his decisions on electric vehicle promotion and subsidies, most of which have favored unionized U.S. auto manufacturers. Musk and his Tesla are viciously anti-union. But something deeper is going on. Musk, Thiel, Murdoch, and their cronies are backing a movement against democracy. Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech financier, has written, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

At first glance, the Jacobs letter [is] (sic) an incredibly detailed accounting of multiple unlawful actions by the ride-hail company. He alleges that Uber’s secretive Strategic Services Group (SSG) “frequently engaged in fraud and theft, and employed third-party vendors to obtain unauthorized data or information.” He also accuses Uber security officers of “hacking” and “destruction of evidence related to eavesdropping against opposition groups.” And he says Uber’s ex-CEO Travis Kalanick knew about a lot of it.

Another Uber employee, Nicholas Gicinto, along with SSG, conducted “virtual operations impersonating protesters, Uber partner-drivers, and taxi operators.” These Uber security employees went to great lengths to hide their surveillance activities from the authorities, Jacobs says. They used computers not purchased by Uber that ran on Mi-Fi devices, so the traffic wouldn’t appear on Uber’s network. They also used virtual public networks and “non-attributable architecture of contracted Amazon Web Services” to further conceal their efforts, Jacobs alleges. Who were they surveilling? Jacobs says SSG’s targets included “politicians, regulators, law enforcement, taxi organizations, and labor unions in, at a minimum, the US.”

And then there was Uber’s innocuously named Marketplace Analytics team. Jacobs says this group was responsible for “acquiring trade secrets, codebase, and competitive intelligence… from major ridesharing competitors globally.” According to Jacobs, Marketplace Analytics impersonated riders and drivers on competitor platforms, hacked into competitor networks, and conducted unlawful wiretapping.