Uber CEO Travis Kalanick just responded to privacy and ethics concerns about Emil Michael, after the top executive publicly suggested paying $1 million to smear journalists who have criticized the multi-billion corporation. Kalanick's medium of choice was Twitter and his method was a "tweetstorm," a series of thoughts that give the illusion of substance and circumspection because they are presented in a numerical order.

It's not easy being Michael Arrington. To kickoff TechCrunch Disrupt SF this morning, the Uber investor directed a fierce and poignant native ad for his CrunchFund investment Uber—right there on stage, in real-time. With Uber CEO Travis Kalanick by his side, it was a veritable duet of damage control! But then Lyft investor Peter Thiel had to spoil the cozy fireside mood by acting just like Arrington.

When you have an unapologetic asshole for a CEO, your company does things like this: Uber is conducting a full-blown street campaign to destroy Lyft using deceptive tactics, The Verge reports. This is what "disruption" really looks like.

Uber, Lyft, and other on-demand taxi startups are on a lobbying blitz this week as California lawmakers consider two pieces of legislation that would strengthen insurance and background check requirements on the companies.

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick likes to talk about the unfair ways that taxi incumbents "protect their monopoly" against his popular product. But the bigger Uber gets, the more aggressive its own protectionist tactics become. CNN says new data from Lyft, a smaller rival, shows 117 Uber employees cancelled 5,560 rides with Lyft drivers around the country since last October.

Republicans have long struggled to capture the hearts of millennials. It's never helped that the emerging crop of young voters are fundamentally opposed to the GOP's archaic social policies and general inclination toward stupidity. But the party of Big Business thinks it has found a wedge issue in Silicon Valley that can seduce skeptical kids: backing anti-regulation startups like Uber.

Re/code reports that Facebook and Uber have discussed integrating the car service into Facebook's Messenger app. Uber was synergized into Google Maps in May. Google Maps is currently no. 14 among free apps in the Apple store. Messenger is no.3.

Uber's growing fleet of human drivers already have plenty of issues with the service: operators in Seattle want to unionize because of alleged managerial discrimination and UberX drivers have protested in San Francisco over low fares. Now Uber CEO's embrace of a driverless car future has infuriated its operators yet again.

Uber, the thunderous on-demand chauffeur startup, released two big pieces of news today. First, it boasted that it's creating a bevy of high-paying jobs. Then, Uber's CEO praised the arrival of driverless cars. You can't be a job creator and a job destroyer.

When I last spoke to Ashwini Chhabra in April, the always dapper Taxi and Limousine Commission deputy was explaining local rules that protect riders from the downside of e-hailing apps like Uber. So I didn't anticipate Chhabra's sudden move from regulator to corporate fixer.

Remember The Unicorn Club of startups that secured an esteemed $1 billion valuation? Might as well be The Garbage Club now, full of trifling companies with worth the kind of coin one chucks out the window from the backseat of an Uber. Why, in the past 24 hours alone, Pinterest and Uber reportedly increased their valuations by a collective $8.7 billion.

The anarchist collective known as the Counterforce has turned its sights from Google to Uber. On Saturday night, a group of tech industry protestors blocked cars with the Uber logo on the street in Seattle, documenting the incident on a Wordpress blog, just like they did with Kevin Rose.

The free market in action: after months of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick saying price gouging helps increase supply, The Verge reports exactly the opposite. This past Valentine's Day, the company blocked new drivers in order to keep prices high.

When Uber announced its plan to radically slash prices for UberX, putting massive pressure on taxis and competitors, TechCrunch said "that's just part of the story." They were right, there is another side outlined in an email Uber sent to drivers in San Francisco (full email below).

If Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is Keyser Söze, this is the moment in The Usual Suspects when he stops limping, sparks up a cigarette, and rides off in a sleek black car. Today, the e-hailing company announced "the most aggressive price cut the company has ever made," in order to handicap the competition.

There's nothing wrong with having contempt for your customers—maybe your customers really are stupid. But if you're the CEO of a prominent company in the midst of popular backlash, hoping to IPO someday, don't make your contempt obvious on Twitter.

For Uber, this weekend's snowstorm was followed by a shitstorm, of a magnitude that would make most reviled CEOs tuck their tails for a few days. Not Travis Kalanick, the techno-libertarian mastermind at the wheel with invisible hands—he's too busy sneering at his customers.

When children are about old enough to stop vomiting on themselves, we teach them that instant gratification is bad—one of the simpler vices. But if Uber has its way and explodes into the big fat company of its own pipe dreams, it will make it OK for us to demand anything we want, whenever we want it.

Valleywag has obtained detailed internal financial information indicating that Uber, the e-hailing app that has spawned a hundreds of half-baked pitches, is making a lot more money than its investors had anticipated.