Travis Kalanick is back: How Uber’s ousted founder went from pariah to Silicon Valley hero

Kalanick’s ouster also signaled a bigger cultural shift. As the epilogue of Super Pumped, the definitive account of Uber’s chaotic early days by tech journalist Mike Isaac, put it: “Change had indeed come to the Valley. With the fading of characters like … Kalanick, the backslapping bro culture of Silicon Valley’s aught era is now seen as passé.”

That may have felt true in 2019, when the book was released, but since then much has changed. Now, after nearly a decade of self-imposed exile, Travis Kalanick is back—not contrite, not chastened, and not especially interested in accepting his critics’ moral verdict on his tenure at Uber.

It seems to be working for him. He has a multibillion-dollar industrial robotics venture, the backing of a powerful new set of patrons, and an increasingly receptive audience of young founders who see his downfall as less a reckoning than a cautionary tale about what happens when Silicon Valley lets investors, journalists, and cultural politics constrain its most forceful builders. Nearly a decade after Uber’s board pushed him out, Kalanick is seen by his admirers as a victim of “corporate cancel culture,” a founder who was unjustly removed before he could finish the job.

In a recent series of video appearances, Kalanick doesn’t seem to have changed much. His hair and beard are gray, and there are new lines in his handsome face, but his affect is the same: charismatic and hypercompetitive, with intense dark eyes that can convey both charm and menace.

Since his ouster, Kalanick has acquired legendary status among a new crop of up-and-coming founders. Some go so far as to compare him to another iconoclast who was forced out of his own company. “He’s the Steve Jobs for founders of my generation,” says Kush Bavaria, who has raised $33 million for his AI data startup Ornn. Bavaria added that young entrepreneurs revere Kalanick for notching the rarest of achievements—building a company like Google or Airbnb whose name has become a verb.

Many in Silicon Valley’s VC establishment are offering Kalanick a full-throated welcome back into the sunshine, too. “It takes a rare kind of entrepreneur to change these old-school, heavy parts of our economy,” Ben Horowitz—whose influential venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), is backing Kalanick’s company, Atoms—wrote in a recent blog post. “Travis is that guy.”

Kalanick himself declined to be interviewed for this story. His closest confidants have also closed ranks around him, but it’s easy to surmise his view from a slew of recent podcast interviews: The Valley got woke, and in its rush to exile leaders deemed toxic or “brilliant jerks” in the #MeToo era, it got soft. It ousted visionaries who built paradigm-shifting companies, to the ecosystem’s detriment. And now that Kalanick is back, he’s bringing with him the grinding “founder’s mode” ethos that built Uber.

Strikingly absent from Kalanick’s recounting of his story: any note of regret or apology. “I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber,” he said in a video released by a16z, blaming his defenestration on “extreme wokeness.”

Bradley Tusk, a prominent political operative and early investor in Uber, concurred. “What is it he should apologize for?” Tusk asks rhetorically. “Why does he need to turn over a new leaf?”

“What is it he should apologize for? Why does he need to turn over a new leaf?”Bradley Tusk, founder of Tusk Ventures

Whether you regard Kalanick’s return with delight or disgust, the basic facts of his downfall are not in dispute: Kalanick and cofounder Garrett Camp launched their startup in 2009 and, by means of aggressive marketing and a win-at-all-costs growth strategy, rapidly built the world’s leading ride-sharing platform.

As Uber grew, however, so did tales of ruthlessness and bad behavior. They included allegations of a misogynistic, boozy corporate culture that failed to hold managers accountable for harassment. Reports also began to trickle out of covert programs with code names like “Greyball” and “Hell” that used underhanded methods to sabotage regulators and competition. The company also faced scrutiny over passenger safety and driver vetting, especially after a rider was raped by an Uber driver in Delhi in 2014 and reports emerged that senior executives had mishandled the victim’s confidential medical records. (Not all these allegations involved Kalanick directly, but critics argued that his scorched-earth leadership style created the conditions and culture for such behavior to happen.)

The company’s reputation took a further hit in early 2017 when one of its former engineers, Susan Fowler, published a detailed memo describing a culture of impunity for high-performing managers, including one who she said sexually harassed her. The memo from Fowler, who declined to comment for this story, jolted Uber’s board, and it commissioned an independent investigation led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The full contents of what became known as “the Holder report” have remained under wraps, but its recommendations, which became public, included guidelines on alcohol and drug use, and a prohibition on relationships with subordinates.

All of this created a public relations mess for Uber, and also a financial one, with investors muttering about a “Travis premium” that depressed the value of the company at a time when it needed to go public. In response, one of Uber’s biggest venture backers, Benchmark, decided that Kalanick had to be replaced with a CEO who could fix the company’s culture and get its fiscal house in order.

The prominent Benchmark partner Bill Gurley was known as the architect of the putsch, but he did not act alone. The dump-Travis coalition also included financial giant Fidelity and other venture capital firms including Menlo Ventures. Together, the faction devised a legal strategy and persuaded a critical number of board members to depose Kalanick—who fought back frantically. The board eventually replaced him with the former head of Expedia, Dara Khosrowshahi, who is still Uber’s CEO. (Uber declined to comment for this story.)

The corporate drama was a huge business story, but the decision to push out Kalanick was not particularly controversial at the time. The prevailing reaction in the media, and among many in Silicon Valley, was that Kalanick’s demise was self-inflicted and long overdue, and that Uber would flourish under a more even-keeled chief executive.

That assessment was not universal. Some viewed the decision of venture capitalists to turn on one of their founders as a betrayal, while others were simply uncomfortable with how the ouster went down. It involved Gurley dispatching two other Benchmark partners who blindsided Kalanick with a resignation letter and instructed him to sign it the same day. The ultimatum came 11 days after the Uber founder had buried his mother, who had died in a boating accident that also badly injured his father.

A Silicon Valley figure who knows Kalanick well says the experience had a profound and permanent effect on how he views the world—framing the traumatic sequence of events as Kalanick’s “Marvel supervillain” origin story. “With Elon, it was when Biden chose not to invite him to a big White House EV summit and chose Mary Barra instead,” the person opined. “With Travis, it was when they forced him out right after the tragedy with his parents.”

Whether the reputation is deserved or not, there’s no question that Kalanick acquired supervillain status in the broader cultural imagination. In 2022, Showtime released a TV series based on Super Pumped, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a boorish, bombastic, and deeply unlikable Kalanick. (Gordon-Levitt himself has said that he played Kalanick as an “Icarus” character driven by ambition for profit, who was driven to become a “mad dog.”) When Time chose the “Silence Breakers” of the #MeToo movement for its 2017 Person of the Year, the magazine photographed Uber engineer Susan Fowler as one of five women, including Taylor Swift and Ashley Judd, for the cover.

There were also allegations of retaliation against journalists who were critical of Kalanick and Uber. Sarah Lacy, founder of the tech industry blog PandoDaily (later Pando), had accused the company of “sexism and misogyny” in a 2014 column, and urged readers to follow her example by deleting their Uber accounts. An Uber executive later mused to a group of journalists that the company could spend $1 million to look into “your personal lives, your families” and, in the case of Lacy, prove a specific rumor about her private life.

Asked about Kalanick’s return to the spotlight, Lacy expressed weary dismay. “There are many people in tech who would never want to work with him,” she said. “It’s not a monolith. But for those who do, I think the Trump era has given everyone cover that they don’t have to care.”

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Far from appearing contrite about his part in the Uber meltdown, in recent podcasts Kalanick recalls some of that era’s skulduggery with the air of a nostalgic scamp. “We had this thing against Lyft where we would recruit their drivers,” Kalanick said with a laugh during the a16z interview. “We would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called ‘Shoplifting.’ ”

Allies say Kalanick’s conduct was mischaracterized at Uber, and argue that he is not personally sexist. Tusk, the early Uber investor, describes Kalanick as generous with his time, money, and mentorship, and more self-reflective than he lets on. “I don’t think he’s a different person at all,” he said. “But you know, of course, he learned from what he went through.”

Indeed, on another podcast, Kalanick indicated that he has done some soul-searching, telling interviewer David Senra, “The problem was, I ran too close to the line … When you are big and important, the scrutiny and the expectation is that you don’t run that close to the line, even if it’s correct. And that is a thing I definitely did not understand.”

In May of 2019, less than two years after Kalanick was forced out of Uber, Khosrowshahi achieved what he had not: an IPO. Kalanick, who had unloaded around a third of his shares to a private investor in 2018, sold the rest six months after the IPO for a pretax haul of roughly $4 billion.

While Kalanick’s media appearances ceased after his ouster, his business activities did not. Over the next nine years, he laid the groundwork for what became Atoms: buying real estate to create food delivery hubs; developing AI and robotic technology; and acquiring a mining venture run by his former top lieutenant at Uber, Anthony Levandowski. Kalanick has also tapped into his formidable network, raising large sums from Saudi investors and pursuing commercial partnerships, including a culinary tie-up with actor and wellness entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow and her Goop brand.

As Kalanick maneuvered to rebuild his business empire, he also seized on a new opportunity to rehabilitate his public image: the rise of an ecosystem of founder-friendly podcasts and vodcasts. These outlets are generally unabashedly pro-tech and give no truck to what many in Silicon Valley view as the pearl-clutching pieties of traditional news outlets. During one episode, the hosts of the popular TBPN podcast asked the Uber cofounder for his autograph.

It’s part of a larger sea change during the second Trump administration—an era of CEO jujitsu matches, tech leaders at Mar-a-Lago dinners, and UFC fights on the White House lawn. And now that Elon Musk owns the social media platform previously known as Twitter, Kalanick pointed out on a recent episode of TBPN, social media has become a safer space for swashbuckling tech leaders: “You’re allowed to be optimistic about things, where maybe before everything had to be negative.”

As he makes the rounds of the tech podcast circuit, the Uber founder is not only laying out the future of Atoms, but building an alternate mythology around himself. In the new telling, Kalanick’s ouster from Uber stands not as a cautionary tale, but as one step in his hero’s journey. And in this version the villain of the Uber story is not Kalanick but venture capitalist Bill Gurley.

For decades, Gurley was one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, but in recent years, his and Benchmark’s role in Kalanick’s ouster from Uber has made him a figure of contempt for some—including the TBPN hosts who, on a recent episode, debated whether founders “who remain reluctant to forgive Benchmark” should consider accepting investment from the firm now that Gurley and several others have left. The TBPN hosts speculate that Uber’s present-day value would be infinitely higher if Gurley and Benchmark had left Kalanick in the CEO seat.

One former senior Uber executive finds the anti-Gurley narrative absurd. “It’s possible to be both pro-Travis and pro-Gurley,” the executive told Fortune, adding that blame for the company’s 2017 crack-up does not lie primarily with either man, but instead was the result of the financial strains that came with waiting too long to go public. Gurley did not reply to requests for comment.

The flip side of the anti-Gurley narrative is praise for Kalanick’s current backers at a16z. The opening sizzle reel of an elaborate PR set piece that includes Horowitz’s “Travis Is Back” blog post and a lengthy interview with Kalanick features the Uber founder declaring that 2017 “would not have gone down that way if Ben or Marc [Andreessen] had been on the board.” (a16z declined to comment for this story.)

One Silicon Valley operative chalks up Kalanick’s return to the rise of the so-called manosphere: “TBPN, Scott Galloway, the Tate brothers, it’s all the same message: ‘Men have been wronged and canceled unfairly for just wanting to say things like, “She’s hot.” ’ We overly corrected, and now the pendulum is way the other way. What was heresy is now, ‘He’s just a rebel.’ ”

And, the operative suggests, the publicity blast seems designed to work on several levels: Filtering the news of Kalanick’s return entirely through the friendly lens of tech podcasts was not just a tactical PR decision; it was also an effective way to ensure that AI large language models, when ingesting information about Kalanick and Atoms, would be primed on positive content.

In the view of Sarah Lacy, the former journalist who became a bête noire for Uber executives, Kalanick’s VC-assisted media tour is just the latest example of a familiar playbook. “Unfortunately, tech bros are always rehabilitated,” she wrote in an email. “Especially if they’ve returned billions in capital. Frankly, it shows how unpopular he was that it took this long.”

If you place a food delivery order in an American city these days, there is a good chance your driver will pick it up from a nondescript warehouse or unmarked counter. These facilities, known as “ghost kitchens,” began popping up around 2019—and Kalanick was behind many of them.

CloudKitchens, his food delivery infrastructure business that has since been folded into Atoms, was Kalanick’s first phase in a plan to rebuild his empire and to “do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.” In the near future, he says, his operation will use AI and robotics to cook and deliver meals without any human intervention. With courier robots bringing burritos to one’s door, he argues, there’ll be no need to go to the grocery store.

Atoms has raised $1.7 billion in equity financing led by a16z, in addition to previous investment in CloudKitchens likely in the hundreds of millions. The company did not disclose a total valuation.

On podcasts, Kalanick has framed the endeavor as part of a “second industrial revolution” and, while hailing Elon Musk as the “greatest of all time” when it comes to physical AI and robotics, pronounced himself the “baby GOAT” of the field. His boast carries some weight, given that Kalanick was able to solve the myriad logistical, technical, and political challenges required to dislodge the taxi lobby when he was at Uber.

And while it remains to be seen whether he can scale his vision for Atoms beyond food preparation and delivery, Kalanick has attracted a growing fan base—mostly young men—who treat it as an article of faith that he can.

Kalanick’s emergence as an aspirational figure has come about not just from tales of his accomplishments, but from his active mentorship of young entrepreneurs. Among his protégés is Shayne Coplan, the mercurial founder of prediction platform Polymarket, who told me during a fraught legal period for the company in late 2024 that Kalanick was one of the few people who had provided him with useful guidance to navigate the ordeal. (Coplan, like other close associates of Kalanick, did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

Several people who know Kalanick well told me that his desire to mentor is sincere, and described him as generous with his time and money. “He would say to a founder, ‘Hey, I’m going to be in Shanghai,’ or ‘I’m going to be in Munich,’ or ‘I’m going to be in São Paulo. Come with me,’ ” says Tusk the venture capitalist.

Some see other motives. “He’s kind of Trumpian in this way,” said a person who worked with Kalanick for years and asked not to be identified in order to preserve his professional relationships. “He likes being surrounded by people who are his boys. He has always, as long as I’ve known him, flown all his friends places to hang out, and it’s great! I’ve been on many of those. It’s kind of like buying friends.”

It’s a safe bet that Kalanick doesn’t care if people hold such opinions of him. And nor do his acolytes for whom Kalanick is not just a generational entrepreneur but the coolest guy around—someone who takes you waterskiing at the lake near his mansion in Austin, or invites you to hang at his other pad in Bel Air.

The cachet surrounding Kalanick has been further burnished by the vogue in Silicon Valley for an ethos known as “founder mode.” The term was popularized in 2024 when the influential investor Paul Graham used it as the title of an essay extolling a speech by a Kalanick contemporary, Airbnb cofounder Brian Chesky. Chesky had spoken of how startup founders must be wary of having their vision clouded by the executives and advisors who surround them, and be unafraid to follow their instincts for any decision, small or large, that affects the company.

Kalanick epitomizes founder mode, and for his younger fans, the ethos represents not only a personal achievement but the promise of freedom—a license to be independent, ambitious, and outspoken. “If you’re a young person in Silicon Valley, why can’t you just say things?” says a former top Uber executive, channeling how a twentysomething founder might describe the mindset. “I’m going to say what I think and be who I am.”

In this era of economic pessimism and dysfunctional governments, Kalanick embodies something else for young entrepreneurs: hope and excitement about the future. Like many other tech founders, Kalanick is a devotee of the polymath science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, and views his vocation as an entrepreneur with a cosmic sense of adventure. He evokes a future that seems infused with excitement and meaning.

Whether you see him as a hero or a villain, Kalanick’s main-character energy can be irresistible, as the late tech writer Om Malik wrote in an essay published after Kalanick announced the launch of Atoms this spring.

“He knows how to do bombast right,” wrote Malik. “And he knows how to play the victim right. He has the right quotes. And he knows how to stumble over himself. In short, a media person has to love Kalanick.”

Given that flair for self-mythology, it should really be no surprise that Kalanick is back, Malik wrote: “It was only a matter of time.”

This article appears in the October/November 2026 issue of  Fortune with the headline “Travis Kalanick is back and Silicon Valley’s prodigal son isn’t sorry.”