Uber will cut 3,300 jobs, roughly a tenth of its global workforce, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced Wednesday. It is the company's largest reduction since the pandemic, when Uber eliminated 3,700 positions, or 14% of its staff.
"This wasn't a decision we made lightly, because it will have a real impact on our teammates and friends who have worked hard for Uber," Khosrowshahi wrote in a letter to employees. He added that the changes are "about how we're organized and what we're prioritizing, not about anyone's contributions to Uber."
The numbers come first: Khosrowshahi said the cuts were not driven by a downturn. He acknowledged Uber "has grown by orders of magnitude" over the past five years, and framed the layoffs as a response to a company that had simply gotten too big to manage. The restructuring, he said, would help Uber run "faster and smarter."
Uber reduced by 20% the number of employees seven or more layers removed from the CEO, cut its "micro-teams" — units with only one or two direct reports — by half, and merged its restaurant, retail, and direct delivery operations into a single team. "The outcome is a simpler org chart geared toward building versus managing," Khosrowshahi wrote, adding that the old structure of running three businesses separately "is no longer serving us at scale."
Khosrowshahi said the expected savings from the leaner organization will be reinvested "in growth, innovation, and the capabilities that will matter most over the coming years" — one of which is putting more self-driving cars on the road within Uber's network.
President and COO Andrew Macdonald said last month that nobody will own a car in the next 15 to 20 years, calling private vehicles a depreciating asset that sits idle most of the time, and predicting that self-driving cars and bikes will fill the gap. "I think autonomous vehicles will be part of that," he said.
Uber originally launched its autonomous-vehicle unit, Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), in 2020, when its valuation of more than $7 billion accounted for over 10% of Uber's $61 billion market cap at the time. Uber later sold the ATG research division to a startup, acknowledging it did not have the money to develop its own robotaxis. The company instead pivoted to deploying autonomous vehicles through partners including Rivian, Baidu, and Pony.ai within its network.
Uber now expects to commit $10 billion to help bring autonomous vehicles to market at scale, with 120,000 cars committed by partners. On the company's Q2 2026 earnings call, Khosrowshahi described the ambition as making Uber the "world's leading commercialization platform for autonomous vehicles." Separately, he said strong results give the company "the ability to continue investing from a position of strength," noting that autonomous vehicles remain "one of the largest opportunities in Uber's history."
Capital rewards clear rules, and Uber's move reads as a bet that a flatter organization, not a bigger headcount, is what scales a platform business. Shedding a tenth of the workforce while the company posts double-digit growth is not the story of a firm in retreat — it is a firm betting that fewer managers and more capital devoted to autonomous technology will do more for shareholders and, eventually, riders than the old layered bureaucracy ever did.
For the employees affected, the human cost is real, and Khosrowshahi did not pretend otherwise. But for a company chasing a capital-intensive robotaxi future against rivals already on the road, trimming management layers to free up cash is the kind of discipline the market tends to reward.
