Dara Khosrowshahi

Early life and education

Khosrowshahi was born in 1969 in Iran into a prominent, wealthy family and grew up in a mansion on his family's compound. He is the youngest of three children born to Lili and Asghar (Gary) Khosrowshahi. His family founded the Alborz Investment Company, a diversified conglomerate involved in pharmaceuticals, chemicals, food, distribution, packaging, trading, and services.

In 1978, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, his family fled Iran when he was 9 years old. Their company was later nationalized. His family first fled to southern France. In 1982, when Khosrowshahi was 13 years old, his father went to Iran to care for his grandfather. The Iranian government subsequently barred his father from leaving the country for 6 years, thus Khosrowshahi spent his teenage years without seeing his father.

In 1987, he graduated from the Hackley School, a private university-preparatory school in Tarrytown. In 1991, he graduated with a B.S. in electrical and electronics engineering from Brown University, where he is a member of the social fraternity Sigma Chi.

Career

In 1991, Khosrowshahi joined Allen & Company, an investment bank, as an analyst.

While still a junior employee at the firm, when Khosrowshahi's boss fell sick one day, Khosrowshahi was thus tasked with explaining the numerical figures of a major company deal to Barry Diller. The chance meeting with the billionaire thereafter made a deep impression on Khosrowshahi.

In 1998, he left Allen & Company to work for Barry Diller, first at Diller's USA Networks, where he held the positions of Senior Vice President for Strategic Planning and then president, and later as chief financial officer of IAC, another company controlled by Diller.

In 2001, IAC purchased Expedia, and in August 2005, Khosrowshahi became Expedia's chief executive officer.

In June 2013, he received a Pacific Northwest Entrepreneur of the Year award from Ernst & Young.

In 2016, he was one of the highest paid CEOs in the United States. Under Khosrowshahi, Expedia extended its presence to more than 60 countries and acquired Travelocity, Orbitz, and HomeAway.

Khosrowshahi was not considering a career move, and initially when approached by a headhunter refused to apply as Uber CEO, but Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek persuaded him during their meetings in 2017.

In August 2017, Khosrowshahi became the CEO of Uber, succeeding co-founder and billionaire Travis Kalanick. He was initially viewed as a "dark horse" candidate in case the initial frontrunners, General Electric's Jeff Immelt and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Meg Whitman, fell through. However, when Immelt flubbed his presentation, Immelt's initial supporters threw their backing to Khosrowshahi. This included Kalanick, even though Khosrowshahi had made clear that under his watch, Kalanick would have no role in Uber's daily operations; as he put it in one of his slides, "there cannot be two CEOs." After several deadlocked votes, Benchmark, a venture capital firm that had helped lead the effort to push out Kalanick, promised to drop a lawsuit against Kalanick if it named Whitman as CEO. Several of the directors read the announcement as blackmail. One of Whitman's supporters switched his vote to Khosrowshahi, breaking the deadlock and making him Uber's second full-time CEO.

He forfeited his un-vested stock options of Expedia, then worth $184 million, but Uber reportedly paid him over $200 million to take the CEO position. He is on Uber's board of directors.

Khosrowshahi's main task was to clean up the image of a company that had become one of the most despised in the country, in part due to revelations about Uber's corporate culture. He replaced Kalanick's once-inviolable 14 values, which contained such items as "super pumped" and "always be hustlin'," with eight values focusing on "customer obsession". At all of his public appearances after taking over, Khosrowshahi stressed the message, "We do the right thing. Period."

In May 2019, Khosrowshahi led Uber in its initial public offering, which he addressed with employees in a company-wide letter.

In 2022, Khosrowshahi’s total compensation from Uber rose 22% to $24.3 million. In 2023, Khosrowshahi's total compensation from Uber was $24.2 million, representing a CEO-to-median worker pay ratio of 292-to-1. Khosrowshahi's total compensation for 2024 was $39.4 million, an increase of 63 percent from the previous year.

Khosrowshahi's net worth is estimated to be at least $238 million as of February 2025.

Political activity

Khosrowshahi is an outspoken critic of the immigration policy of Donald Trump. Khosrowshahi is a college friend of former Minnesota U.S. Representative Dean Phillips and has supported his congressional races.

In November 2019, Khosrowshahi caused controversy in an interview with Axios on HBO when he compared the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi to the death of Elaine Herzberg by an Uber self-driving car in 2018. He called them both "mistakes" that can "be forgiven". The Saudi government is an investor in Uber and has representation on its board of directors.

Personal life

Khosrowshahi has two children from a first marriage.

His uncle, Hassan Khosrowshahi, fled Iran due to the Iranian Revolution. A cousin, Amir, co-founded Nervana Systems, which was acquired by Intel in 2016 for $408 million. Another cousin, Golnar, founded Reservoir Media in 2007 as a music publishing company.

Khosrowshahi is on the list of "Prominent Iranian-Americans" published by the U.S. Virtual Embassy Iran.

References

References

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