With rumors circulating that Meg Whitman was being lined up as a possible replacement for Travis Kalanick at Uber, the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) CEO has taken to Twitter (where else?) to reveal that she won’t be joining the ride-hailing giant.
Whitman, who joined eBay as CEO in 1998 and led it to become an ecommerce titan by the time she left a decade later, joined Hewlett-Packard as CEO in 2011. She remained as HPE CEO after the company’s reshuffle, while also serving as chairperson for HP’s board of directors. But Whitman stepped down from the HP board earlier this week, feeding speculation that an Uber appointment was on the horizon.
Early this morning, Whitman made a rare appearance on Twitter to tell the public that while she doesn’t normally comment on rumors, she would make an exception, given the “distraction” this one was causing.
Her triumvirate of tweets culminated with: “We have a lot of work still to do at HPE and I am not going anywhere. Uber’s CEO will not be Meg Whitman.”
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https://twitter.com/MegWhitman/status/890754773456220161
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While Whitman’s series of tweets seem to suggest that the Uber rumors were nothing more than that, the timing coincided with a report on Axios that suggested the Uber board weren’t united behind Whitman as a potential appointment, with Kalanick and Arianna Huffington apparently against the move.
So it’s not entirely clear whether Whitman was ever genuinely considering taking up the position as Uber’s head honcho — either way, she has now stopped the rumormongers in their tracks.
Uber cofounder Kalanick resigned as CEO in June following a series of scandals, and more than a month later, the company seems to be no closer to finding a replacement. The company may have a tough time finding someone with not only the experience and skills needed to take on the gargantuan task of guiding a $70 billion startup around its regulatory roadblocks, but also the willingness to dive head-first into a whirlpool of negativity and toxic bro culture.
