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Uber chief Travis Kalanick has resigned from US president Donald Trump’s business advisory council after a bruising few days in which it was reported that hundreds of thousands of customers had deleted their accounts in protest at the firm’s apparent cosiness with the US government.
In an e-mail to Uber employees on Thursday, Kalanick admitted that he was stepping back from the president’s strategic and policy forum because the company was being widely perceived as “somehow endorsing the administration’s agenda”—a situation which appears to be bad for business.
The perception arose last weekend, in the chaotic wake of Trump’s heavily criticised executive order to prevent the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. As sudden protests broke out in light of the travel ban, the New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance—many of whose members are working class immigrants and Muslims—announced it would cease pickups at the city’s main airport hub, JFK.
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Source: Ars Technica – Uber boycott forces boss Kalanick to quit Trump biz council, but Musk stays