Travis Kalanick, the Uber co-founder and one-time Silicon Valley bad boy, has relocated to Austin.
He disclosed the move to a residence on Lake Austin while discussing his new company Atoms.
“I’m Austin now. I own a place in Austin. I’ve owned it for five years,” the billionaire former CEO of ride-hailing giant Uber Technologies Inc. said on the tech podcast TBPN, noting his love of waterskiing and the lake just 20 minutes from the city.
Kalanick was pushed out of the global ride-hailing company in 2017 over reports of rampant workplace-culture issues around sexism, violations of privacy and misogyny.
The company’s massive growth and exploits were detailed in Mike Isaac’s book “Super Pumped,” which later became a scripted Showtime series. The book opened a window on the lives of Silicon Valley’s Tech Bro culture, one that valued fierce competition, shirking of government rules and business growth above all else.
Now, he is CEO of Atoms, a robotics company catering to the food, mining and transportation industries.
Kalanick is the latest tech boss to decamp to Texas from California’s technology locus. Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was a progenitor of the movement — publicly quitting California and nominally moving some of his companies to the Lone Star state. Late last year, Trump administration crypto and AI czar David Sacks opened an office in Austin and relocated to the city ahead of California’s proposed wealth tax.
Such moves come alongside a surge of corporations relocating to Texas. Beyond Musk’s Tesla, SpaceX and X, tech relocations have included Oracle Corp. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. Last month, Public Storage announced the move of its corporate HQ to Texas from California. Ahead of it came Chevron Corp., AECOM and McKesson Corp.
After getting the boot from Uber, Kalanick became CEO of City Storage Systems, best known for ghost-kitchen operator Cloud Kitchens. The company exploded in value during the pandemic and now has a value of $76 billion, according to Fortune Business Insight.
Atoms, the new name for the company, has been operating for eight years and wants to create “gainfully employed robots.” Those robots will go to work in kitchens but also are geared towards mining and transport companies.
“There’s a lot of room for specialized robots that do things in an efficient sort of industrial-scale kind of way, which is sort of where we play,” Kalanick said on the podcast.
As of Friday, according to a report by The Information, Kalanick was exploring a partnership with Uber. According to Forbes, Kalanick has a personal net worth of $3.5 billion.