Yahoo News Tim Cook once scolded Uber's Travis Kalanick into submission
Travis Kalanick, Silicon Valley's bad boy CEO, once had a very uncomfortable confrontation with Apple CEO Tim Cook, who is a grown-up.
Back in 2015, Uber tried to disguise the fact that the company was secretly "identifying and tagging" iPhones, even if the ride-hailing app had been deleted.
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As a new, oh-so-juicy profile in the New York Times points out, the scheme didn't go over well with Cook.
Obviously, losing the iPhone market would have been disastrous for Uber, so Kalanick promised to cut it out.
Before, he had tried to hide the practice—called fingerprinting—by geofencing Apple's headquarters, "a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code from people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark."
Sadly for Kalanick, Apple engineers outside of Cupertino noticed was going on, which prompted the uncomfortable meeting with Cook.
(“We absolutely do not track individual users or their location if they’ve deleted the app," an Uber spokesperson said. "As the New York Times story notes towards the very end, this is a typical way to prevent fraudsters from loading Uber onto a stolen phone, putting in a stolen credit card, taking an expensive ride and then wiping the phone—over and over again. Similar techniques are also used for detecting and blocking suspicious logins to protect our users' accounts.")
But that's not the Uber CEO's only awkward interaction with a celebrity! There was also that time he rejected Jay Z's money and met Oprah at Ibiza.
That's a shame, because Oprah probably could have shaped the corporate culture for the better. (Uber has repeatedly been slammed for creating a hostile work environment for women.)
While Kalanick has made a few questionable decisions as CEO, the 40-year-old has some pretty impressive accomplishments in his past, like once holding "the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game."
And we should be happy he went into tech—in 2003, he picked up a form and created a website for a potential California gubernatorial run, according to the Times.
He once called Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead his favorite book (although he's backed away from being called a Libertarian), so who knows, in an alternate reality, he's governor of a state where Lyft is banned, government regulations are constantly ignored, Wii Tennis is played in every high school, and he and Oprah are total besties.