Dara Khosrowshahi

Dara Khosrowshahi (, ; born May 28, 1969 ) is an Iranian and American business executive who is the chief executive officer of Uber. He was previously CEO of Expedia Group, a company that owns several travel fare aggregators. He is on the board of directors of BET.com and Hotels.com, and was on the board of The New York Times Company.

Early life and education

Life in Iran 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.

Refugee in France and the US In 1978, on the eve of the Iranian Revolution, his family fled Iran when he was 9 years old. Their company was later nationalized. Like many other wealthy Iranians, his family fled France, in his case to southern France. 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.

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 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 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.

In September 2026, Khosrowshahi announced that Uber would reduce its workforce by 10% and consolidate management layers as part of an effort to streamline the company and increase investment in autonomous vehicles.

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.