Most people battle traffic to get to work. Travis Kalanick appears to be skipping it altogether.
The Uber cofounder and former CEO posted a video on X in June showing what he called his “5 minute jet ski commute” across Lake Austin to his new office, giving followers a glimpse of his unconventional trip.
On Wednesday, Kalanick said on TBPN that he recently went roughly 70 miles per hour on his jet ski to work. The ride was still five minutes, unless it rained, he said.
He described the ride as a “notch on the belt,” asking: “Who else do you know is jet-skiing to work?”
Kalanick said that he did a ChatGPT search for other CEOs who took a jet ski to work. There were one or two, he said, but nobody at a company with over a thousand people.
One of the hosts chimed in: “Only a Texas resident.”
“Texas resident, that’s right,” Kalanick said. “Primary residence, let’s go.”
Kalanick owns a home on Lake Austin. The billionaire entrepreneur said in his first appearance on the TBPN podcast in March that he has owned the place for five years, drawn in part by the lake and his love of water sports.
There’s a growing list of tech leaders who have traded Silicon Valley for Texas. Billionaires and companies alike have been drawn by lower taxes, cheaper real estate, and a friendlier regulatory climate than California, where rising costs and talk of a one-time billionaire wealth tax have rattled some executives. Tesla, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise are among the companies that have shifted major operations to the state.
Kalanick is now leading Atoms, the newly renamed version of City Storage Systems and the parent company of CloudKitchens. The startup is developing AI-powered robots designed to automate repetitive physical work in industries such as food service, mining, manufacturing, and logistics. He previously described Atoms’ goal as building “gainfully employed robots” that can take on specialized tasks at an industrial scale.
Kalanick co-founded Uber in 2009 and helped turn it into a ride-hailing giant before resigning in 2017. Since then, he’s been focused on building software and robotics for kitchens, mining, and logistics.
And while his move to Austin gives him the choice of several robotaxis, it seems like Kalanick will be boating his way to work.
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