Uber CEO Called the Gruesome Murder of a Journalist a Forgivable “Mistake”
Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, gave a bizarre defense of Saudi Arabia in an interview with Axios on HBO. During the conversation, Axios host Dan Primack asked about Khosrowshahi's decision not to attend a Saudi-led summit after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi national who wrote articles critical of the government. In 2018, Khashoggi was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a 15-member team, who reportedly dismembered his body with a bone saw and carried it out of the consulate in suitcases. The incident sparked international outcry and an exceedingly rare rebuke of Saudi Arabia from the U.S. Senate.
Khosrowshahi, inexplicably, called the murder a mistake, and compared it to a woman who was killed by one of Uber's test versions of a self-driving car. "It’s a serious mistake," he told Primack, before adding, "We’ve made mistakes too, right? With self-driving, and we stopped driving and we’re recovering from that mistake. I think that people make mistakes, it doesn’t mean that they can never be forgiven. I think they have taken it seriously."
The most generous interpretation of these comments is that Khosrowshahi was looking for an opportunity to use work in talking points on the self-driving-car accident, and he chose a wildly inappropriate segue. At its worst, it sounds like he's dismissing the brutal, state-sanctioned murder of a political dissident as a careless error. That Saudi Arabia is the fifth largest shareholder of Uber, with $3.4 billion in shares, doesn't make Khosrowshahi sound any less craven. Khashoggi's editor, Karen Attiah, strongly condemned Khosrowshahi on Twitter, writing, "@Uber’s CEO is showing us what moral bankruptcy looks like in real time. This is the spiritual rot that ensues when profits are placed over lives."
An investigation by the CIA concluded that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, a man previously fawned over by Western media as a bold and modern reformer, ordered the killing himself. A U.S. official told The Washington Post, "The accepted position is that there is no way this happened without him being aware or involved." The CIA cited a phone call Khashoggi had with the prince's brother, Khalid bin Salman, who told Khashoggi to go to the Istanbul consulate to retrieve official documents and assured him that it was safe for him to go. While it's not clear that Khalid knew Khashoggi would be killed, multiple sources told the CIA that he made the call at his brother's request.
Before the interview even aired, Khosrowshahi tried to walk it back. On Twitter, Primack said, "About an hour after ending our 'Axios on HBO' interview with @dkhos, Dara called my cell to express regret for the language he used vis-a-vis Khashoggi. The next day he email over an official statement." In his statement, Khosrowshahi wrote, "I said something in the moment that I do not believe. When it comes to Jamal Khashoggi, his murder was reprehensible and should not be forgotten or excused."
Crime
On a Saturday evening in February, a 45-year-old Uber driver and father of two named Jason Dalton got into his car, left his home near Kalamazoo, Michigan, and began shooting people. But the strangest, most unfathomable thing about the night that Dalton killed and killed again is what he did in between.
Originally Appeared on GQ
