Dealing with (Shhh) the Saudis - Bloomberg:
Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber Technologies Inc., is once again playing the villain.
CloudKitchens, Kalanick's new startup, secretly accepted a $400 million investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund in January, according to the Wall Street Journal. The investment came just a few months after the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which the CIA has blamed directly on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The killing led to a round of soul-searching about whether tech companies should be accepting investment from the Saudi government. Uber, which took $3.5 billion from the Saudi PIF in 2016, came under particular scrutiny. Yet in the middle of the controversy, the company's erstwhile co-founder was apparently planning to get back in bed with the Saudis.
It’s not as if the political problems with Saudi Arabia have faded since last year. News of the CloudKitchens investment emerges just a few weeks after Silicon Valley types shunned this year's “Davos in the Desert,” the Saudi government’s glitzy investment conference. And earlier this week, federal prosecutors accused two former Twitter employees of helping Saudi Arabia spy on political dissidents.
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