When Uber announced last year that Ms. Huffington had joined the board, it released a video<br />that featured a softer side of Mr. Kalanick and a warm, maternal voice-over from Ms. Huffington.<br />A year later, Ms. Huffington met Mr. Kalanick at a technology conference in Munich,<br />and the two bonded over Uber’s potential to solve big urban problems.<br />It now falls to Ms. Huffington, Ms. Martello and Bill Gurley, another board member<br />and a partner at the venture capital firm Benchmark, to complete some of the urgent tasks at Uber, like vetting candidates for a chief operating officer.<br />(Ms. Huffington recently visited the hospital where Mr. Kalanick’s father, who was injured<br />in a boating accident, was staying, according to two people with knowledge of the event.)<br />“Her guidance has been invaluable to me personally over the years, and I know<br />that in this new role she’ll help take Uber to the next level,” Mr. Kalanick said in the announcement.<br />Some Uber executives have grown wary of her close ties with Mr. Kalanick, according to three employees close to executive deliberations.<br />After divorcing Mr. Huffington in 1997, Ms. Huffington became known for switching allegiances from Newt Gingrich<br />and the Republican Party to the world of left-wing satire.<br />“I was interested in not just what Uber had achieved,<br />but in its future,” said Ms. Huffington, who later founded Thrive Global, a health and wellness business, in 2016.
