Uber lays off 3300 staff despite earnings
“Too much time ‘aligning'” Khosrowshahi explains
If Uber was a money manager, it would be Bernie Madoff.
If Uber was a doctor, it would be Dr. Kevorkian and if Uber was a nurse, it would be Elizabeth Wettlaufer.
If Uber was a politician, it would be Richard Nixon, or maybe Mao Zedong.
If Uber was a vegetable, it would be Kale.
I could go on with these all day, but I’m sure you get my point. I have been writing about Uber for 12 years now, and no good thing ever happens for me to report. The constant litany of updates is mentally exhausting and depressing beyond description. When the “Dilbert” cartoon above popped up on X, I had to save it because it so perfectly describes my life and editorial experience following the endless litany of horrible “news” about Uber.
I officially don’t think we can call it “new” anymore. I think it’s just Uber. Like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss, I’ve been publishing news versions of same predictable story – “UBER IS A HORRIBLE COMPANY THAT TREATS PEOPLE LIKE CRAP” – for weeks and months and years.
This morning, I read the entire, long message Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi released to surviving Uber employees to explain why he just fired 10 per cent of Uber’s workforce, 3,300 of their former colleagues.
“I’m sure you’re asking, ‘Why, and why now?’—particularly since our business is performing so well,” Khosrowshahi notes near the top of the memo.
Imagine the mental pretzel into which that poor man has to twist his brain in order to write a memo which justifies getting rid of “valuable” staff while simultaneously giving edgy shareholders confidence that their investment was not a mistake.
“Today, we’re making a number of significant organizational changes across Uber. We are removing layers, simplifying team structures, refining our global location strategy, and focusing our people and investments against the biggest opportunities ahead of us. As a result, we will be reducing the size of our team by about 10%. Everyone whose role has been affected has already been notified, except in countries where we will follow the required local process.
“This wasn’t a decision we made lightly, because it will have a real impact on our teammates and friends who have worked hard for Uber. It’s important to say that these changes are about how we’re organized and what we’re prioritizing, not about anyone’s contributions to Uber, which we will always value,” he is kind enough to point out, tactfully leaving out the part about not letting the door hit anyone on the ass on the way out.
Last month, I covered a new report that appears to prove something everyone has known all along: that driving passengers for money requires commercial insurance, and Uber drivers are in fact paying for this insurance through their “Uber service fees” which helps explain why they lose half or more than half of every fare to Uber. Uber owns its own commercial insurance firm and sets its own rates. If Uber gets its way, an injured fare would be insured up to $60,000 instead of $1 million. That’s how much Uber values its customers.
How does this business stay in business? Are people truly so frantic for a cheap ride? Are drivers that desperate to have some cash in hand they’ll trash the private vehicle they fund themselves for slave wages? Are politicians so stupid, they believe a system which cannibalizes public transit while creating immeasurable amounts of congestion and emissions is a good thing?
Why, you might ask, don’t I just write about the millions of happy travellers who use Ubers daily?
Because Taxi News and Road Warrior News exist for the industry, not the consumers. It’s “dedicated to those who work where the rubber meets the road.” Taxi News was launched in 1985 to cover professionals in the ground transportation industry: the people committed to the Vehicle for Hire industry, the suppliers who support them, and the governments that regulate them.
This is not a publication for people who need rides. It’s a publication for people who provide rides, safely and profitably. Ostensibly, Uber falls into that category. However, if you spend enough time following Uber stories you see definite patterns which indicates Uber may care about a lot of things, but providing excellent, safe ground transportation is not one of them.
How else could a ground transportation firm normalize the practice of raising prices when a snowstorm hits, or algorithmically torturing desperate drivers with quixotic rates of sub-poverty level pay? Or receive a sexual assault complaint every 8 minutes?
“Uber figured out how to get laws changed at the municipal level really quickly,” one thoughtful, retired Taxi operator mused to me last year. “The lobbyists, the lawyers, getting consumers and voters onside by giving away free rides. It’s brilliant, really.”
When Uber was able to insert itself into the Ontario government process by hiring the firm owned by Doug Ford’s campaign manager as its lobbyist, the same man called me back.
“Look at that! Announced in the Fall Economic Statement in November, provincial regulations written by April. British Columbia, Newfoundland, and now Ontario. Uber has got our provincial law-making systems figured out, too. I wonder what will happen when Uber goes after Canada’s federal government?”
My caller has a point: what if Uber is just testing the fences to find the weakest entry points into a nation’s legislative systems? Once they’ve figured out how to get politicians to write the legislation they want governing ground transportation, labour law and insurance, what’s to stop them from expanding into telecommunications, banking, artificial intelligence? Oh, wait, Uber already has an AI division….there’s a thought to give you nightmares.
“First Canadian Bank of Uber.” That has a ring to it….maybe as part of the current American Trade War settlement. We have a lot to look forward to.
September 2, 2026
Building a simpler, faster Uber
Dara Khosrowshahi
CEO
The message below was shared with Uber employees today.
Team,
Today, we’re making a number of significant organizational changes across Uber. We are removing layers, simplifying team structures, refining our global location strategy, and focusing our people and investments against the biggest opportunities ahead of us. As a result, we will be reducing the size of our team by about 10%. Everyone whose role has been affected has already been notified, except in countries where we will follow the required local process.
This wasn’t a decision we made lightly, because it will have a real impact on our teammates and friends who have worked hard for Uber. It’s important to say that these changes are about how we’re organized and what we’re prioritizing, not about anyone’s contributions to Uber, which we will always value.
I’m sure you’re asking, ‘Why, and why now?’—particularly since our business is performing so well. Over the last 5+ years, Uber has grown by orders of magnitude, with our top line nearly tripling. We’ve built new products, expanded into new businesses, reached more consumers and supported more earners, and become a much larger and stronger company. But that growth has also brought complexity: more layers, more coordination, more fragmented ownership, and in some cases structures that made sense when businesses were smaller but no longer serve us well at our current scale.
Our opportunity from here is enormous: we have the chance to bring Uber to hundreds of millions more people; to invest even more in drivers, couriers and merchants; and to innovate across our core businesses and build the autonomous future.
To do those things, we need to make deliberate choices about where we put our people, our time, and our capital.
The changes we’re making today are designed to do two things: make Uber simpler and faster, and create more capacity to invest in our future. A leaner organization will mean clearer ownership, faster decisions, and more time spent building rather than coordinating. It will also generate savings that we intend to reinvest in growth, innovation, and the capabilities that will matter most over the coming years.
It’s our job as leaders to make these difficult calls, and to give you transparency into our thinking and our decision-making process. Here’s what we are doing and why:
Organizational health: In Pulse surveys and conversations with many of you, we’ve heard that too much work requires coordination across teams, debates take too long, and decision-making rights are unclear. I’m sure many of you have felt that you spend too much time “aligning” rather than building, shipping, or serving customers. To improve this, we have reduced roles primarily focused on coordination, and have clarified the remit of the coordination roles that remain. We also cut down the number of management layers by broadening manager scopes, particularly where we had “micro-teams” of only 1-2 reports. In all, we’ve reduced the number of employees who sit 7+ layers from the CEO by 20% and the number of micro-teams by nearly 50%. The outcome is a simpler org chart geared toward building versus managing.
Team simplification: We brought together teams where fragmentation was creating duplication and slowing decisions. The most significant example of this is Mac’s decision to combine our three current Delivery Ops teams (across Restaurants, Retail, and Direct) into single-threaded teams at the global, regional, and country levels. Running these three businesses separately made sense in their early days, but that structure is no longer serving us at scale. Bringing the P&Ls together under single owners will reduce overlap, clarify accountability, and allow GMs to allocate capital more efficiently and effectively based on their strategic imperatives. Another example of this: in Tech, we’re combining our Core Services Engineering and Science teams, mirroring the structure we already have on Mobility and Delivery.
Location strategy: The benefits of sitting together, collaborating in person, and solving problems as a team are clearer than ever in our post-Covid world. With that in mind, we’re establishing clearer principles for where roles and teams should be based, with the goal of concentrating teams in a smaller number of key hubs. Global teams will be concentrated in our largest global hubs, NY and SF; regional teams in designated regional hubs; local teams in country hubs; and tech teams in tech hubs. We’ll prioritize co-location between managers and their teams wherever possible, particularly for earlier-career employees. We are also asking the vast majority of remote employees to move to an office, and going forward, only ~1% of employees will be remote. We’ll also continue to reinforce compliance with our hybrid work policy, which requires three days a week in the office. You can read more about our location strategy here.
I realize this is a lot of change, but we decided it was better to make one big shift rather than multiple small ones. We also know organizational changes can be hugely distracting, and our job is to create an environment that allows you to focus and do your best work. With these decisions now made, our focus is on the future.
We have tremendous momentum, significant financial capacity, and opportunities in front of us that are larger than at any point since I joined the company. The decisions we’re making today are difficult, but they will help us build an even stronger Uber for the years ahead.
You can read more about the changes across the company here, and please be sure to read specific follow-up information you’ll receive from your leaders about what this means for your team, so we can all keep building together.
Uber on,
Dara
