
Uber CEO calls Saudi murder of Khashoggi “a mistake,” scrambles to backtrack - smacktoward
https://www.axios.com/uber-ceo-saudi-arabia-jamal-khashoggi-mistake-92865f2a-d97c-4d6a-b171-5e7c0a69e77a.html
======
HeXetic
A prototype self-driving car runs over a person due to negligence on the part
of the test operator who was supposed to prevent it and failures on the part
of the team who created the vehicle.

It was not _negligence_ or _failures_ that sent killers to an embassy before
Mr. Kashoggi was scheduled to arrive, strangled him, cut him up into pieces,
sent out a body double as a distraction, disposed of the evidence, and lied
about everything.

~~~
gdulli
It reeks of "no real person involved." Just an inconvenient abstraction to
them.

~~~
criddell
The NRPI expression is something I first heard about on the HBO show
Succession. Does that phrase have a history of use before that show? If I
google it, I only come up with hits for the tv show.

~~~
elliekelly
I hadn’t heard NRPI until Succession but I’ve heard NHI for “No Human
Involved” in the context of crimes committed against sex workers. The only
thing that comes up on Wikipedia is the name of a CSI episode though so I’m
not sure if it’s a term that’s actually used by police. I would hope not.

------
Zenbit_UX
Wow, just to restate this conversation in a different way: the ceo of a major
company would rather remind the world of the time their car _killed_ someone
then condemn a murder by one of his investors.

Good on the journalist for asking tough questions and not letting him weasel
out.

~~~
deegles
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends
upon his not understanding it."

I feel that quote describes a lot of the current issues in Silicon Valley.

~~~
save_ferris
This definitely reminds me of the scene where Gavin gets pelted with a water
ballon and storms into his office yelling “There was a time where guys like me
could have guys like that killed! But, times have changed.” And then turning
to his lawyers, “unless...”

------
passive
At least this is in the article too:

After the interview aired, the Uber head tried to disassociate himself from
it, saying he had misspoken. “I said something in the moment that I do not
believe,” Khosrowshahi said in a statement Monday. “When it comes to Jamal
Khashoggi, his murder was reprehensible and should not be forgotten or
excused.”

~~~
vanderZwan
> “I said something in the moment that I do not believe”

Sure he didn't. This is like a political version of Schrödinger's Douchebag.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMabpBvtXr4)

~~~
dictum
Not to gotcha this, but "I'm someone whose statements should not be taken to
heart" is not a message I'd want to convey in an apology.

Then again, corporate communication is often a game of being as cynical as you
can get away without getting arrested or having your business shut down, so
maybe there's some meta-honesty here.

~~~
lonelappde
There's also Angelou's "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the
first time."

------
beart
The initial shock from this statement is the downplaying of a deliberate
decision to torture and murder a man as an 'accident'.

However, what I find more surprising is that he would associate the Uber
incident with Khashoggi at all. Why would you want to tie together the thought
of a brutal, politically motivated murder, to that of your self-driving car
running someone over?

~~~
Udik
I think he thinks that Kashoggi's murder was something like a situation that
had gotten out of hand, or that it was decided by some low rank official.
Otherwise, as you say, it wouldn't make sense to compare it to an actual
accident (however caused by reckless behaviour).

------
noobermin
To be honest this won't assure anyone. This is not a very politically savvy
move, to quite understate it.

EDIT: to expound further, the CEO has to have caught wind that the company is
facing an amount of criticism for the killing of the pedestrian. To use it to
justify another, popularly condemned act requires a good lack of political
sense.

------
tibbydudeza
Not surprised ... Softbank funded companies seems to have a thing for
appointing wackadoodle CEO's.

------
MS90
Everyone giving this guy so much shit like they've never accidentally tortured
someone to death and cut them up into little pieces. SMH.

------
EGreg
To all of you moralizing how could the Uber CEO say the wrong word about the
horrific Kashoggi murder... look in the mirror for a second.

I find it weird that when it comes to Saudi Arabia the vast majority of
Americans seem to only care about Kashoggi and when to comes to Libya
Americans seem to care only about four Benghazi Embassy workers. It occupies
99% of the outrage space.

So much outrage and ink spilled, Benghazi Benghazi 24 hours a day for years,
by Republicans because it made the “untouchable” Hillary Clinton lose a lot of
political support.

Meanwhile, the Saudi coalition bombs Yemen relentlessly, creating arguably the
worst humanitarian disaster of modern times, and we continue to sell them
weapons.

Meanwhile Libya is a failed state, an embarassment to the International
community, millions of people live in dangerous country overrun by gangs,
because we invaded and removed the government and created a political vaccum.

But we care ONLY about four embassy workers and one person who isn’t even a US
citizen.

When a major stadium in Beirut was attacked by ISIS same day as the Paris
attacks, countries around the world flew French flags but Lebanon was a
footnote.

We certainly do seem to think of Arabs as “others” even if many of them are
white like in Lebanon.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beirut-l...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/middleeast/beirut-
lebanon-attacks-paris.amp.html)

Boko Haram is terrorizing Nigeria, but we don’t talk much about it. People are
fleeing a drought in Honduras. Right in our back yard, the Zetas and Sinaloa
cartel have been beheading people and running entire cities for decades, but
not getting nearly the coverage of ISIS. Instead many people just focus on how
there is an “invasion” of refugees at the border and we need to declare a
national emergency.

We need to start thinking of all humans as equally worthy of our compassion.

~~~
bogomipz
>"I find it weird that when it comes to Saudi Arabia the vast majority of
Americans seem to only care about Kashoggi and when to comes to Libya
Americans seem to care only about four Benghazi Embassy workers. It occupies
99% of the outrage space."

The majority of the Americans I know care about human rights, gender equality,
freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and democracy. The macabre and
brazen murder of Kashoggi intersects with more than a couple of those
concerns. The people responsible intersect with all of those concerns. There
is not shortage or reason's to be outraged.

Your inclusion of Bhengazi here is truly absurd.

~~~
EGreg
Nothing absurd about it. Benghazi is an even more egregious example of the
phenomenon I mentioned.

The phenomenon is the amount of outrage at what happens to four Americans
while at the same time hardly any coverage of the MILLIONS of non-Americans
who have to live and face atrocities in the failed state of Libya we helped
destroy. That’s the phenomenon, Kashoggi is just another example.

------
AndrewBissell
I understand the shock people feel at seeing Dara's dissembling answer, but
the vast vast majority of Silicon Valley has done nothing to lessen its ties
to Saudi money, and almost none of the major tech figures who feted Mohammed
bin Salman on his US publicity tour -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark
Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, Sundar Pichai, Jack Dorsey, Peter Thiel, or Reid
Hoffman -- have said a word in protest of the Khashoggi assassination.
Hopefully the furor around this video will encourage some intrepid journalist
to ask them!

------
saluki
I feel like I should stop working in tech and pursue a more profitable career
as a common sense advisor to CEOs and Professional Athletes.

~~~
mtnGoat
you might be surprised to find out their advisors are telling them to do this
wacky stuff, to get press. (source: old friend works in Hollywood PR, its
insane!)

------
Svip
But I am not sure this statement can be forgiven.

------
TwoNineA
Let's all act shocked!

1- Uber is funded in part by Saudis.

2- They don't consider jaywalkers in their autonomous driving software showing
that human life is ... not important.

~~~
Gibbon1
I think I read somewhere that the concept of jaywalking was invented by the
automobile industry. Go back to 1850 and the idea that you can't just walk
across the street would be seen as inane.

------
rpmisms
Uh. That's terrifying either way the comparison goes.

------
gatherhunterer
The headline should reflect that he has since acknowledged that this was a
stupid thing to say and that he claims he does not believe it. It is telling
to see the lengths to which one will go to please the Saudis. First you say
something in public to show fealty to the authoritarian then you categorically
retract the statement and apologize. Most people will never hear the
retraction because most people won’t read the article but those who do
business with him will do so, allowing him to save face while losing some
little-valued public dignity. The news media plays into this perfectly because
they will twist the story to be as clickable as possible; he is not referred
to by name but rather by position and his retraction is not in the headline
because maximum outrage begets maximum clicks.

------
sschueller
Didn't SA just invest in Travis' new startup?

------
strikelaserclaw
Guy is just a typical CEO who says what he needs to inorder to please his
current audience. It would have been better to make no comment as he really
was stuck between a rock and a hard place if you only consider it from the
perspective of his role.

~~~
lonelappde
It's it really about the comment. Sometimes the reality is so stark that
merely asking the question is the whole point, and the answer doesn't matter
at all.

------
lolc
Like the House of Saud can't prevent dissidents from being murdered by Saudi
thugs, the House of Uber can't prevent pedestrians from being run over by Uber
cars. They would prefer other outcomes but if somebody's in the way, mistakes
are going to happen. Take note and step out of the way, little human.

The Saudi regime is legally executing people for "witchcraft" and other choice
infractions. The extralegal murders only happen when the legal options are
exhausted. I'm not sure where the parallel to Uber is there. Maybe the
comparison was a mistaken one from the start?

------
Bombthecat
Saudi Arabia invested heavily in uber.

Just FYI.

~~~
astura
Yeah, It's mentioned in the article

>Khosrowshahi’s call for forgiveness of the Saudis, Uber’s fifth largest
investor, included a callous comparison to the company’s missteps in the self-
driving technology space where, in March 2018, one of its vehicles
accidentally struck and killed a pedestrian in Arizona.

~~~
navigatesol
> _Khosrowshahi’s call for forgiveness of the Saudis_

The Saudis planned and carried out the brutal murder of minor dissident on
foreign soil. Forgiveness? This is embarrassing. Where are the SV overlords,
calling this out?

------
golergka
As a non-native speaker, I'm confused and irritated that the word "compare" is
used in the meaning "equate". In math, I can compare any scalar value to any
other scalar value; what I can't do is equate them. Is it indeed used
incorrectly in this context, or am I missing something?

~~~
evan_
In this case “compare” is used in a less formal way, basically “these things
are in the same category”.

If the speaker had said “those things can’t be compared” that would mean one
was so much worse than the other that they weren’t even in the same category.

It’s the same sense of the word you might use in the saying “you can’t compare
apples and oranges.” The conditions that make an apple good are not the same
as the conditions that make an orange good.

------
cannabis_sam
There’s something hilarious about every saudi/us story.

A son of a wealthy saudi family recruited a bunch of saudis to attack the the
US, and suceeded(!) yet there’s been no backlash on saudi arabia..

But hold on, Iran is financing Hezbollah in Lebanon, obviously US resources
should focus on this!

------
jyounker
This seems like a really bad comparison. You could take it as Dara
Khosrowshahi saying that über's self driving car program was created with the
intention of killing people.

------
joshstrange
Oh yeah, Saudi's brutally tortured and murdered Khashoggi, Uber's self-driving
car ran over a woman, and I forgot to take out the trash this week on trash
day. All mistakes, all equal. Are we going to hold this over their heads
forever, it was /just a mistake/.... /s

"I didn't read the CIA report" well neither did I but from the coverage alone
I would never call this a "mistake". Also they own 1/5th of your company, do
some fucking research, if anything you should be more informed about this than
the average American.

I'm getting rather sick of this bury-your-head-in-the-sand tatic more and more
people are taking when it comes to reprehensible things. "I didn't read the
CIA report", "I don't read his tweets", "I didn't read the muller report", "I
didn't read the whistleblower report" \- IT'S YOUR GOD DAMN JOB, I don't know
why we continue to allow ignorance of current events directly related to
people's jobs to be a valid excuse.

~~~
dang
Would you please not rant like this in HN comments? Venting indignation
doesn't make this place better, and whatever substantive comment you have to
make can be made in a way that adds information, not noise. When the froth
rises all the way to allcaps, that's particularly a sign of the wrong
thresholds being passed.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Also, please don't post the same comment twice:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505062](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21505062).
Duplication is a sure way to add noise not signal. (Also, when there are
duplicate submissions, we'll probably merge them, in which case your comment
will appear twice in the same thread or we have to make special effort to
exempt it from merging, and also move any replies that it got so that the
replying users aren't punished for your duplication.)

~~~
joshstrange
Feedback taken, I apologize and will refrain from ranting in the future. I was
unaware of the merging of stories being a normal thing on HN as I regularly
see multiple stories posted about the same topic (not same link). I posted on
one story then went the the home page, saw it posted under a different link
and copied my comment over as it appeared to be where more discussion was
happening.

~~~
dang
Thanks for replying so nicely!

Yes, we definitely don't merge all of them but we do get many:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20comments%20moved&sort=byDate&type=comment)

[https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...](https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20merged&sort=byDate&type=comment)

------
azangru
Not trying to troll or anything, but why does opinion of a business exec on
what the Saudis did matter one way or the other?

~~~
praptak
It gives quite an insight into the ethics of big business, or lack thereof.

------
nautilus12
Its becoming blatently apparent that high tech is heavily tied to saudi
interests which are (not so) secretely supporting radical sunni interests in
the middle east starting with the arab spring and our state departments
conflicted interest and collaboration with tech at that time. I would not be
surprised if we found evidence that social media companies were involved in
creating bots to fan those flames leading to the death of thousands.

~~~
lonelappde
I don't think "radical" or "Sunni" are the key features here. "Genocidal" and
"oppressive" are.

~~~
nautilus12
I recognize the social need to project the avoidance of religious
discrimination, but if the "genoicidal" and "oppresive" behaviors can be
directly tied to radical religious motivations then the label is apt.

------
mcnichol
So what are you gonna do about it?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do
nothing.” ― Edmund Burke

------
calyth2018
Contrast this with the NBA or Blizzard Activition.

My guess is what the Uber CEO said will be buried pretty quickly.

------
hatsunearu
Unless he's saying a self-driving car death is as heinous as a political
assassination...

------
claudeganon
Well, at least he’s now likely to get an OED entry under the examples for
“Freudian slip.”

------
nickthemagicman
Does Lyft support and minimize the torture and murder of journalists who go to
embassies to get marriage documents then chop up their bodies put the body
parts in a suitcase and bury them in their backyard? All the while the fiance
is waiting outside for her future husband to return?

------
notimetorelax
I think this statement is reprehensible, still is this post an HN material?

~~~
CalChris
If HN is going to cover business articles then yes.

~~~
dang
HN covers intellectually interesting articles:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Rage posts lead to rage threads. Those get many reflexive upvotes but tend not
to be intellectually interesting. This thread is a case in point.

~~~
CalChris
I thought it was intellectually interesting in that I wasn’t at all expecting
Khosrowshahi to say that. Then it seriously got me to rethink how deep KSA’s
talons are in Silicon Valley. I came up in the Sun Microsystems and Google
generation of early profitability and fierce independence. This anti-unicorn
era of unprofitability and obsequious dependence is disappointing. But if you
are beholden to your funder then you are beholden to their politics. It really
was the SV business angle I found interesting.

~~~
dang
That's as strong a case as anyone could make and I appreciate it. Perhaps if
you or someone had posted a full comment like that early in the thread, it
could have taken an intellectually interesting direction—they are sensitive to
initial conditions.

------
s_y_n_t_a_x
What all large companies does SA have a huge stake in?

Twitter, Uber...

------
whalebird
There's no such thing as bad publicity.

~~~
praptak
\-- the French aristocrats before the Revolution.

I'm not saying we're gonna see heads rolling anytime soon, just that people
tend to forget until they don't.

------
JustSomeNobody
I wish people would boycott Uber until he apologizes for putting money ahead
of actual human life.

------
jamisteven
career suicide for this guy. Good look with that IPO now dude.

------
Talyen42
Here I go making mistakes again, murdering people left and right, i'm so
clumsy, mondays right? \- Saudis probably

------
jacquesm
From now on a particularly bad example of false equivalence will be known as a
'khosrowshahi'.

Neither of these were mistakes. The one was a premeditated murder, the other
gross negligence.

~~~
lonelappde
Is it a false equivalence though? Both show an utter disregard for human life,
unde the guise of "guy in charge says get the job done, and is indifferent to
whether someone innocent gets killed". I'm sure MBS would have been happy if
Jamaal Khashoggi would have survive but stopped criticizing the Saudi govt or
whatever. But if the business and the people in it happen to kill someone,
that's OK too.

From Uber CEO's perspective, this is about the amoral organization optimizing
for profit, not about the specific people who did the torturing. Would it be
mere negligence if the tortures were AI drones instead of people?

------
whafro
There were so many other things he could have said and not created this
maelstrom – "Of course Mr. Khashoggi's murder was reprehensible and
inexcusable, but we're told by the Crown Prince that it was a rogue operation,
and we trust that's the case. If a member of our board were involved in this
sort of heinous act, I would be asking for his or her resignation."

But he didn't, and squirmed with a few "well, you're obviously deeper in this
than I am" indications that he wasn't well-prepared on this issue.

It's tough for a CEO to go from talking to the press about the tech behind
their tech company to talking about everything else in the world – that's what
the CEOs of conglomerates and oil companies spend decades of their career
being groomed into. In this case, he's learning on the job, the hard way.

~~~
jacquesm
> but we're told by the Crown Prince that it was a rogue operation, and we
> trust that's the case

We also believe in:

\- the tooth fairy

\- SantaClaus

And many other such examples besides. All that wriggling in order not to find
a reason to resign and show some conscience. Either that or be blunt about it,
what he _really_ should have said was:

"Yes, Khashoggi was murdered. My investors unfortunately are lying murderous
scum but I still have a company to run."

~~~
whalebird
Do you really think that's what he should have said? Because that sounds like
a vastly dumber thing to say, even if it's "honest".

The "rogue operation" story is "good enough". It's plausible. That doesn't
mean it's true of course. It doesn't have to be. Nobody has to _actually_
believe it. It's just good enough so that everyone involved can save the
minimum amount of face required to move on.

The reason that the murder can be considered "a mistake" is that the fallout
was far greater than estimated. Consider that the Saudis are killing political
opponents all the time with very few issues.

It's probably the grandeur of the plot that made the difference here. If
Khashoggi had just been shot in the streets by "unknown assailants" (Putin
style), it wouldn't have been that big a deal.

------
ngngngng
Oof

------
navigatesol
Silicon Valley is in bed with the Saudis, no surprise here. Meanwhile, the
shrieks coming from California about Trump are deafening.

~~~
Udo
Not only Silicon Valley. I struggle to see the relation to the Trump
administration here, but in any case they are deeply in the Saudis' pockets as
well, same as with any other administration that came before. To paint the SA
regime and the US leadership to be somehow in opposition to one another
doesn't really make sense. The cold hard fact is that they need each other and
act accordingly.

~~~
navigatesol
> _I struggle to see the relation to the Trump administration here_

SV CEOs and "personalities" refuse to sit on panels or visit the White House
because they hate Trump and his administration. But they'll take money from
Saudi Arabia. It's very hard to understand.

~~~
Udo
Thank you for clearing that up, I think I misunderstood your original comment
to mean that the Saudis and the US administration are opposites.

I think you're right that there is some hypocrisy involved when CEOs publicly
denounce unpopular politics only to support deplorable practices as soon as
money is involved.

------
_pmf_
OK Habibi Travis.

------
buboard
Freudian slips have better be avoided. I would like to think he's not such a
horrible person, though.

~~~
evan_
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

------
mangix
How did the topic of Khashoggi even come up?

Pretty sure the reason he was killed was some internal Saudi stuff.

~~~
jonnydubowsky
Pretty sure the atrocities in Myanmar, North Korea, and tsarist Russia we're
also due to "internal stuff".

