Dara Khosrowshahi

Dara Khosrowshahi (born 1969) fled Iran with his family during the 1979 revolution, rose through investment banking and IAC, and ran Expedia for twelve years before taking over Uber in 2017 with a mandate to repair the scandal-plagued company. He steered Uber to its IPO and its first sustained profits — and then bet its next act on artificial intelligence.

Robotaxis and an AI-first workforce

Rather than build autonomy in-house, Khosrowshahi sold Uber’s self-driving unit in 2020 and repositioned the platform as the marketplace for everyone else’s robotaxis, striking partnerships with Waymo, Rivian, and others. The strategy culminated in an expanded deal with Jensen Huang’s Nvidia, announced at GTC in 2025, to deploy a global fleet of 100,000 Level 4 robotaxis starting in Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2027. Internally, he has said roughly 90 percent of Uber’s engineers use AI tools and has mused publicly that instead of adding engineering headcount he could add AI agents and more GPUs.

Khosrowshahi is also unusually blunt about the downside. On The Diary of a CEO podcast in 2026 he estimated AI will eventually replace 70 to 80 percent of the work humans do — intellectual jobs within a decade, physical ones within two — and accused fellow executives of privately admitting the “sheer amount of disruption” coming while publicly reassuring audiences that everything will be fine. Asked what Uber’s millions of drivers and couriers will do when autonomy arrives, he answered simply that he does not know. Critics note the tension: the man voicing the warning is the one building the displacement machine.