Dara Khosrowshahi

Dara Khosrowshahi is the chief executive of Uber, appointed in 2017 to steady a company then in public crisis, and previously the long-serving CEO of Expedia. He is known for turning Uber to profitability and positioning it as the demand aggregator of the autonomous-vehicle era.

Born in Iran, Khosrowshahi came to the United States as a child when his family fled the revolution and lost everything — an origin he credits for a durable competitive drive and a habit of not letting external chaos affect him. He trained as an engineer and began his career at Allen & Company before spending two decades working with Barry Diller, first at IAC and then running Expedia. He took the Uber job on Daniel Ek’s recommendation, drawn by the company’s impact on how the world moves rather than by a safer, happier path.

Core positions

Uber is a physical-world business, not merely a digital one: interactions begin in the app but resolve in a probabilistic real world, which makes it machine-learning-native and shapes how it should adopt AI. His marketplace doctrine is supply-first — recruit drivers and merchants, especially outside the top cities, and demand follows. On autonomous vehicles he favours coexistence over confrontation: own demand and the go-to-market layer, partner for the self-driving stack, and treat AVs as another trillion-dollar market to aggregate. As a leader he prizes unfiltered ground truth, seeks out the ‘troublemakers’ who keep a company mutating, meters the cost of intelligence against exploration, and treats being wrong as the source of learning.

In the wiki

• Dara Khosrowshahi on Uber, AI, and the Autonomous Vehicle Future — Uber in the physical world, the AV transition, marketplace supply dynamics, and leadership through constant challenge.