Jeffrey Immelt, the outgoing chief executive at General Electric Co, is among a handful of candidates taxi-hailing firm Uber Technologies Inc. is considering for the top job, media reports said.
Uber’s head of human resources told employees that the company was considering fewer than six names for the corner room, Bloomberg reported citing two people familiar with the matter.
Immelt joins former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, former Twitter COO Adam Bain, former Virgin America CEO David Cush, former Disney CEO Thomas Staggs and former SoftBank Group Corp chief operating officer Nikesh Arora among the people who are reportedly being considered for the post.
General Electric had announced last month that Immelt, a long-serving CEO, will step down on August 1, and another company veteran John Flannery will replace him.
Meanwhile, Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman, whose name was also doing the rounds, has denied the reports. “I am fully committed to HPE and plan to remain the company's CEO. We have a lot of work still to do at HPE and I am not going anywhere. Uber's CEO will not be Meg Whitman,†she wrote on microblogging website Twitter.
Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick had to step down as chief executive of the cab-hailing firm in the face of mounting pressure from investors. The development came a week after Kalanick announced he would take time off to help the company resolve the controversies it had got itself embroiled into.
That followed a probe into the company’s culture and practices by US Attorney General Eric Holder, after a former female employee publicly accused it of promoting sexual harassment by often looking the other way.
Uber has also been in a legal tangle with Waymo, Google’s self-driving car unit, over intellectual property theft. Waymo has accused Uber of stealing trade secrets and infringing on patents of its self-driving programme.
Since February, Uber has lost or sacked at least a dozen senior executives, from president of engineering Amit Singhal to finance chief Gautam Gupta.
