There are very few things that $5bn can’t buy, but one of them is manners. This week video emerged of Travis Kalanick, the CEO and founder of ride-share app Uber, patronising and swearing at one of his own drivers, who complained that harsh company policies had forced him into bankruptcy. “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit,” sneered Kalanick. Truer words were never spoken by a tycoon: for Uber, along with many other aggressive corporations, not taking responsibility for your own shit isn’t just a philosophy, it’s a business model.

Uber has barely been out of the news this year, with a succession of scandals cementing the company’s reputation as a byword for cod-libertarian douchebaggery. Accusations of strike-breaking during protests against Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban” sparked a viral campaign to get customers to delete the app. A week later, a former employee went public with accusations of sexual harassment and institutional misogyny. Kalanick, who was pressured to withdraw from a position as a business adviser to Trump, is now facing legal suits across the world from drivers who insist that they would be better able to “take responsibility” for their lives if they could earn a living wage.

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That entitlement is key. Charges of sexism against Uber are not just incidental to the way the company operates. They are symptomatic. An organisation’s attitude to women is a good predictor of how it will treat its workers. There is clearly an outfit that regards at least one half of the human race as rather less than sentient. One of its executives threatened to expose the personal details of a female journalist who questioned the way the business was being run. Kalanick has joked, if you can call it a joke, that he should have named his company “Boob-er”, because of the amount of action he gets out of it. The corporation offered French riders the perk of being driven about by attractive women.

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Here’s the awful truth: we have entrusted the reorganisation of our social infrastructure to the sort of people who shout at their subordinates and drivers and view women as a collection of parts. We do not owe these people our money or our admiration.

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Uber has lost a U.K. court case it brought against a London transport authority that plans to require private-hire taxi drivers to pass an English-language communication exam.

The test was first announced back in 2015 by then London Mayor Boris Johnson, and was aimed at bringing more regulation to the burgeoning private-hire taxi industry that companies such as Uber have enabled. The purpose of the exam is to verify that drivers have basic geographic knowledge of London’s streets and that those from non-English speaking countries have proficiency in English reading, writing, and listening. The city’s public transport body, Transport for London (TfL), had planned to implement the new rule, among other regulations, beginning last October, but Uber and three drivers filed a legal challenge in the U.K. capital and subsequently won the right to take TfL to court to challenge the ruling.

Uber has previously claimed to support some level of English-language requirement but argued that the test proposed by TfL was too rigorous. “TfL’s plans threaten the livelihoods of thousands of drivers in London, while also stifling tech companies like Uber,” said Tom Elvidge, general manager at Uber London.

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“This is a deeply disappointing outcome for tens of thousands of drivers who will lose their livelihoods because they cannot pass an essay writing test,” said Elvidge, in a statement provided to VentureBeat. “We’ve always supported spoken English skills, but writing an essay has nothing to do with communicating with passengers or getting them safely from A to B. Transport for London’s own estimates show that their plans will put more than 33,000 existing private hire drivers out of business.”

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Almost two weeks ago, Susan Fowler came forward with horrific allegations of sexism and sexual harassment at Uber. One week ago, another “Uber survivor” anonymously detailed what she had endured at the company. To show this problem runs rampant outside of just this one startup, the Observer talked to women who work in tech who have also faced blatant sexism and sexual harassment at work—the problem turned out to be so prevalent that it only took us a few hours to find 12 women willing to tell us their stories.

Today, another former Uber engineer named Keala Lusk took to Medium to detail the sexism and other forms of corruption she faced and witnessed during her time at the company. And like how our story showed sexism isn’t just an Uber problem, her post shows it’s not just a male manager problem. The source of her discrimination was her female boss.

“Near the end of my time at Uber, I reached out to HR and my manager about the disrespect I was facing — from the female engineering manager I [reported] directly to each day,” Lusk wrote. “Unlike all of the other Uber stories I have read, I wasn’t dealing with some white guy in power. This is a woman, just like me. Like all of the other stories, nothing changed even after multiple meetings with my manager and HR. It was simply brushed aside and swept under the carpet of collective Uber suffering.”

Lusk begins by listing some of what she saw and experienced: malicious fights for power, interns repeatedly working 100-hour weeks but only being paid for 40 and discrimination against women and the transgender community. And then she gets into her own experience, mostly in the form of a summary of the last email she sent to HR in an attempt to rectify the situation with her manager, who is referred to with the pseudonym Tina throughout the post.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Uber has for years engaged in a worldwide program to deceive the authorities in markets where its low-cost ride-hailing service was resisted by law enforcement or, in some instances, had been banned.

The program, involving a tool called Greyball, uses data collected from the Uber app and other techniques to identify and circumvent officials who were trying to clamp down on the ride-hailing service. Uber used these methods to evade the authorities in cities like Boston, Paris and Las Vegas, and in countries like Australia, China and South Korea.

Greyball was part of a program called VTOS, short for “violation of terms of service,” which Uber created to root out people it thought were using or targeting its service improperly. The program, including Greyball, began as early as 2014 and remains in use, predominantly outside the United States. Greyball was approved by Uber’s legal team.

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Outside legal specialists said they were uncertain about the legality of the program. Greyball could be considered a violation of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or possibly intentional obstruction of justice, depending on local laws and jurisdictions, said Peter Henning, a law professor at Wayne State University who also writes for The New York Times.

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When I read Susan Fowler’s story, my blood boiled. I am not able to sleep. My friends kept sending me updates on the story and insisting on letting my own experience be made public. I am sure there are plenty of women still working at Uber’s San Francisco office who have many such stories to tell. Here is my story.

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I am a midwestern girl in her late 20s working in a silicon valley start-up trying her best to survive in the tech industry as a woman who hates wearing make-up. My paycheck is 18% less than my less qualified male colleagues. I was raised by a working class single mom who taught me to work hard, be kind to others and contribute to the society in any way I can. I went to public schools my whole life and worked two jobs to put myself through a top private college. I have a degree in Computer Science and a Master’s in Information Systems. I am 5 foot 7, Caucasian, and I never dye my dark hair. I like New Balance sneakers, love Golden Retrievers and hate wearing heels.

After graduating from college with my Master’s, I started my career as a Data Analyst in a tech company in the Midwest and left when it was acquired by a Chinese firm. When I received the job offer from Uber, I could not hide my excitement. I bought my friends fancy drinks and kept bragging about my big move to the big beautiful city of my dreams. I imagined spending weekends hiking with my new nerdy, liberal, open minded buddies who respected human beings irrespective of their gender, sexuality, or religion. I was also nervous to face a culture so different from the humble midwest. I remember how the interviewers constantly tried to trigger me and insulted my intelligence to see if I break under pressure. While they succeeded in triggering me, they failed to break me. I am not someone who breaks under pressure. Also, I have a strong moral compass and I stand up for what is right and fight what is wrong. Therefore, it hurts me to say that despite my grit, I was not prepared to deal with the abuse and dehumanizing treatment I received from my supervisors and colleagues at Uber. Uber finally broke me by destroying my dignity as a human being, and reduced my aspirations by attaching their worth them to a female reproductive organ. Like they did to Susan, Uber killed a part of me that was most precious.

The first two months at Uber was an exhilarating experience. I sat amongst the cream of the crop of Silicon Valley in fancy rooms where new innovations were being thought of at rocket speed. We had engineers who are stolen from Google, NASA, Apple and even a guy who used to work at a high position for the Federal Government. My team was made up of 21 people. There were just two women in the team, and I was one of them. The other female member soon switched teams leaving me as the sole female team member. The next few months at Uber were grueling, unforgiving, exciting and exhausting at the same time. Deadlines were set without any justification and we were expected to meet them at any cost. It was normal for me to get to work at 7 in the morning and leave late at night with only a thirty minute break in between. Our work revolved around database and networking scalability. Some days, I loved working 12 hours straight. But, there were days when everyone in the team were on the brink of giving up. The supervisors were often arrogant, impatient, and aggressive with their expectations. It was normal for our supervisors to openly appreciate the performance of one member over the other and publicly demean members who did not perform as per their expectations. Chauvinistic, racist and homophobic attitudes were far too normal at Uber. Once in a group chat, team members referred to a new Asian American recruit as slanty eye joe. It was normal for guys to refer to other guys as fags when they didn’t participate in private parties where sex and drugs were involved. It was normal for guys to openly refer to attractive female colleagues as sluts when they refused to go out with them. They had private chats where guys wrote sexual fantasy stories about female colleagues and supervisors where they performed all sorts of demeaning acts on the women. I confronted the guys on my team whenever they passed lewd comments about female supervisors but never felt comfortable confronting guys who were not in my team.

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Amit Singhal has left his job at Uber as its SVP of engineering because he did not disclose to the car-hailing company that he left Google a year earlier after top executives there informed him of an allegation of sexual harassment from an employee that an internal investigation had found “credible.”

Singhal was asked to resign by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick this morning.

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This revelation comes at a dicey time for Uber, as it has been under scrutiny of late, due to an explosive blog post by a former female engineer who alleged numerous incidents of sexism, sexual harassment and also painted a picture of a very dysfunctional HR department and management structure.

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Sources said the female employee who filed the formal complaint against Singhal did not work for him directly, but worked closely with the search team. She also did not want to go public with the charges, which is apparently why Google decided to allow Singhal to leave quietly.

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Uber has hired former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to conduct a review of sexual harassment claims at the ride-hailing service made by a former employee.

Holder and Tammy Albarran, who are partners at the law firm Covington & Burling, will look into the complaints about a manager at Uber , as well as general questions about diversity and inclusion, Chief Executive Travis Kalanick told his employees in a memo on Monday that was seen by Reuters.

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Susan Fowler, the former Uber employee who complained of being the target of sexual harassment by her manager, wrote in a blog post on Sunday that when she reported the offense to human resources officials and management, they declined to punish the alleged offender because he "was a high performer" and that this was his first offense."

Fowler also said, after speaking with other female employees, she realized that both HR and management had been lying about this being the manager's "first offense."

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