Uber CEO Travis Kalanick says he’ll take a leave of absence

Enlarge / Uber CEO Travis Kalanick at the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China last year. (credit: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Uber's embattled CEO, Travis Kalanick, told employees today that he will take an indefinite leave of absence.

The company's board of directors held a seven-hour meeting on Sunday to discuss the details of an internal investigation led by former Attorney General Eric Holder, now in private practice at Covington & Burling. In addition to the intense scrutiny on Uber's corporate culture, Kalanick has undergone personal tragedy recently. Last month, his mother was killed and his father was seriously injured following a boating accident.

"Recent events have brought home for me that people are more important than work and that I need to take some time off of the day-to-day to grieve my mother, whom I buried on Friday, to reflect, to work on myself, and to focus on building out a world-class leadership team," Kalanick wrote in a company-wide e-mail sent out earlier today, which was also published on Re/code and Techcrunch.

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