In ‘Super Pumped,’ the Uber Founder Disrupts His Own Rise

In a scene from Showtime’s new anthology series “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” Travis Kalanick, the ride-sharing company’s controversial founder, strides into the boardroom as the Beastie Boys song “Rhymin & Stealin” blasts on the soundtrack.

Over the next two-and-a-half minutes, Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and his right-hand man, Emil Michael (Babak Tafti), proceed to pitch investors, as a supercut of iconic duos like Batman and Robin, Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein flashes across the screen.

The high-energy sequence suggests the heroic lens through which Uber’s leaders see themselves. The fact that viewers will interpret the scene very differently speaks to the shift in perception that Silicon Valley and its aspiring world-changers have undergone in pop culture.

First, we saw them mostly as swashbuckling, if often cutthroat, innovators. (Remember “Pirates of Silicon Valley”?) Next, as awkward but highly competent upstarts. (Remember “The Social Network”?) Then, we poked fun at them. (Remember “Silicon Valley”?)

Now, they’re the supervillains — and catnip for screenwriters.

“The ability of these people to self-mythologize and to occupy a place in our society that gods used to occupy, is completely fascinating,” said David Levien, who, along with Brian Koppelman and Beth Schacter, is a showrunner, writer and executive producer of “Super Pumped,” which debuts Sunday.

The fascination has been evident for a while in the work of Koppelman and Levien, who (with the New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin) created the Showtime financial drama “Billions.” When that series debuted in 2016, it wasn’t hard to sell the viewing public on the idea of predatory hedge funders as villains. But in a sign of the times, their villain this season talks the messianic talk of Silicon Valley; he’s a self-styled do-gooder who won’t hesitate to bulldoze whoever gets in the way of his grand visions.

Their latest plunge into the world of bare-knuckle capitalism, “Super Pumped,” is an early arrival among several scripted series and films targeting the real-world titans of Big Tech, including two about the recently convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes: “The Dropout,” a mini-series debuting next month on Hulu, and “Bad Blood,” a film in the works by Adam McKay. (An HBO docu-series by Alex Gibney on Holmes, “The Inventor,” aired in 2019.) Also planned are the Apple TV+ mini-series “WeCrash,” about the office rental start-up WeWork, also debuting next month, and a recently announced HBO series about Facebook, “Doomsday Machine.”

In taking on Uber, “Super Pumped” (based on the nonfiction book by the New York Times reporter Mike Isaac, who is also a co-executive producer) chronicles one of the 21st century’s most profitable and disruptive start-ups. Starting with the company’s founding in 2009, the show spends seven episodes tracing the rise and fall of Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and former chief executive, who was pressured to resign in 2017 after the company was hit with a series of privacy scandals and lawsuits about workplace discrimination and sexual harassment.

“We want to look not only at why culture affords them this position,” Levien said of the Silicon Valley elite, “but what they’ve done and are willing to do to attain and keep their positions.”

Schacter added: “Disruption is often the soil that monsters grow in. And we wanted to make sure every episode built to that, so we weren’t just dropping people in like, ‘This guy’s a bad guy.’ You have to see the whole journey to understand it.”

WHEN “SILICON VALLEY,” the HBO satire series about an awkward gang of up-and-coming programmers, premiered in 2014, Big Tech still loomed heroically in the public imagination. Steve Jobs, who died in 2011, had attained virtual sainthood. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg still graced magazine covers and visited the White House for reasons that did not involve defending themselves before Congress.

The cult of the founder has since foundered, and for few so spectacularly as for Kalanick. Less than a decade ago, Uber looked to many like an exciting — if flawed — solution to various urban transportation woes. But as Kalanick’s ruthless tactics came to light, scrappy images of conquest were increasingly replaced by those of cabdriver suicides and price gouging. Those tactics include a safe-ride surcharge that was, employees said, primarily a play for profit, a “God view” tool that allowed employees to track the location of riders without their permission and a “Greyball” program that allowed it to block law enforcement officials from booking rides.

Still, Koppelman said they didn’t set out to make “Super Pumped” a straightforward villain origin story.

“We wanted you to understand why Travis was effective in his world,” Koppelman said. “We wanted you to see moments where his power of personality and intellect are able to convince people.”

Neither the writers nor Gordon-Levitt contacted Kalanick, who was not involved with the series. When the writers had questions, they consulted Isaac, whose reporting was based on five years of research and interviews with more than 200 sources. (Kalanick declined to participate in Isaac’s reporting and declined to comment for this article.)

“We wanted it to be based on the research and the book, and not be swayed by personal feelings one way or the other by interacting with him,” Levien said.

Gordon-Levitt said that while he was tempted to judge Kalanick, as he learned more about him — including by talking to people who worked with him — he came to see him as the product of a culture obsessed with winning.

“From what I can gather — from the book, and from the people that I spoke to — he was always convinced that he was doing the right thing,” he said. “That’s something that probably all of us humans do at different times, when we get focused on a certain goal and we get Machiavellian. We think, ‘This goal is so good, and if I have to make other compromises on the way, it’s worth it.’”

The “ideation rooms” and Soylent diets of Silicon Valley hardly make for the most naturally compelling drama. So the creative team added flourishes like a garish green font that underscores big moments and animated power rankings for the major players. Above all, it has a pulsing soundtrack to accompany Uber’s heart-pounding quest for world domination.

“It’s fun, it’s fireworks, and, in a way, it’s theater,” Gordon-Levitt said. “I really applaud Brian and David for being able to provoke questions about these larger issues in the world while spending most of their energy just putting on a great, fun show.”

Although all the characters traffic in the usual over-the-top, boastful Silicon Valley lingo, it is Gordon-Levitt’s Kalanick who most aggressively embodies the self-aggrandizing, antagonistic clichés of start-up bro culture. At one point in the series, Kalanick’s mentor, the venture capitalist Bill Gurley (Kyle Chandler), says of Kalanick: “The best thing about Travis is he’ll run through walls to win. The worst thing about him is he thinks everything’s a wall.”

It’s a great line. It was also taken from real life. “That was Mark Cuban’s take on Travis,” Gordon-Levitt explained. (Cuban passed on the opportunity to invest in Uber, a decision he has said he regrets.) “That was a real quote. He said it to me; he said it to Brian.”

It was Gurley’s task to rein in Kalanick’s more destructive excesses. As depicted in the series, those included turning a blind eye to — and even encouraging — a cutthroat workplace culture, casting aside the law when it curtailed his ambitions and bragging about the sexual conquests Uber afforded him. (In a 2014 interview with GQ, he appeared to refer to his growing sex appeal as “Boob-er.”)

Gurley eventually staged a coup to oust Kalanick from the company, but only after supporting Kalanick for years.

“Travis is Icarus,” Chandler said. “And Bill is trying to explain to Icarus not to go too high or too low. He was always keeping him in the middle.”

But as much as Uber was steeped in bro culture, men aren’t the only ones who wield power and influence in “Super Pumped.” (Bro-ness is, in some respects, a state of mind.) Travis’s biggest mentor, perhaps, is his business-savvy mother (Elisabeth Shue). Arianna Huffington (Uma Thurman), who joined Uber’s board in 2016, is a commanding presence from the moment Travis meets her.

As Uber’s first female board member, Huffington helped look into the company’s handling of the sexual harassment accusations. She was later criticized for some of her public statements, in which she described the harassment as not a “systemic problem,” and for defending Kalanick. Eventually, Kalanick was pushed out, and Huffington left the company two years later, in 2019.

Thurman, who plays her with a Greek accent fine-tuned by hours of listening to recordings of her talks, said she didn’t try to persuade viewers to be for or against Huffington.

“She’s a brave, inventive thinker,” said Thurman, who has met the real Huffington many times and always found her “strong-willed.” “She’s funny, smart and pragmatic but also dominates every scene she’s in. It’s emboldening for me as a woman to play someone with so much confidence and such intellect.”

UNLIKE A CLASSIC GREEK TRAGEDY, the Uber story does not end with the death of the protagonist — or the company. The lying, the spying, the lawbreaking: It all paid off.

Despite a high-profile ouster that left his personal reputation in shambles, Kalanick, by all accounts, is doing just fine. A billionaire, he is the chief executive of a company focused on developing distressed real estate and is building a ghost kitchen empire in Europe.

Uber’s prospects are similarly peachy. After a disappointing initial public offering in 2019 under Kalanick’s replacement as chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, the company’s market capitalization fluctuated but ultimately held steady at a valuation of over $70 billion. Uber has about 118 million monthly active users around the world.

Which is to say, Silicon Valley types may increasingly be the bad guys in popular culture, but they appear to be here to stay.

“What’s most fascinating about the story isn’t just Uber itself or Travis himself, but the larger cultural trends that led to Uber becoming inevitable,” Gordon-Levitt said. “When entrepreneurs are held accountable for profits and profits only, you get these companies that grow incredibly fast and achieve incredible success, but at what cost?”

It’s a question “Super Pumped” hopes to continue exploring in future seasons, which will focus on other moments in business history that have changed the cultural landscape. (Showtime announced last week that the series had been renewed for a second season, which will focus on the boom years of what used to be called Facebook — now Meta — specifically the relationship between Mark Zuckerberg and its chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.)

Will Big Tech ever put people above profits? Can wannabe disrupters succeed without compromising their morals? Can good and greed coexist?

Is it even possible to be an ethical billionaire?

“Is it possible?” Schacter said. “Sure.”

“Have we met one?” she continued. “No.”