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

In 2017, it looked as if the tech world had seen the last of Travis Kalanick. Following a spate of scandals and allegations ranging from sexism to corporate espionage, Uber’s own investors took the extraordinary step of forcing the CEO out of the firm he cofounded. 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…