It is going to be a disaster, you can’t go from running a multi billion company to being lean and nimble - he should just find a nice golf club and work on his putting
Personally, I think he is a good person and amazing enterprenuer. Yes, I've seen that can driver video and legions of article how Uber is losing money. I think people don't understand the herculean task of disrupting this entire space of 100 year old business backed by government sponsored monopolies and their extremely rich benefiting donors. This guy comes out of nowhere with nothing and puts up a fight in 700 cities across the world and wins. I believe if he was allowed to continue leading he would have disrupted entire logistics space and Uber would be bigger than Amazon. Unfortunately VCs and their media darlings don't want to wait for another decade and wants to milk the cow until it dies off.
he wasn't scaling as fast as the business since 2015 or so and refused to trust responsible lieutenants to run the company more reasonably. He would walk the engineering floor getting his nose in things and making changes which caused outages and regressions on New Year's Eve (our biggest day for the next six months) and no one including the CTO had the guts or ability to put him in his place. IMO he should have got rid of Jeff Holden and been head of product himself, which I think is the role he wanted to be in and the role he would be most impactful in. Holden certainly wasn't interested in the Uber product of 2015 as much as he cared about the Uber product of 2035. Playing CEO again with CK seems like a waste of money if they expect another Uber. I don't really care since it's the Saudi royal family's money being wasted though.
I don't know or care enough about him to comment on his personal ethics or whether he was the only person in his position who could have had his level of impact as you are probably implying. All I saw was him and the rest of the leadership team doing whatever they could to meet growth metrics while the day to day in engineering was awful and unsustainable and using the same things you say, as excuses to not do better.
I also don't think the business would be in any better position today if he was CEO than what Dara has done. Uber was never a 120bn$ company. It could be/have been but I don't think that Dara is any more responsible for the downfall than Travis or the board or the media darlings. The battleground cities Uber is fighting to maintain service (NY license cap, LADOT MDS standard) in are fighting back from Travis's bully behavior in those 700 cities, not Dara's. This is the natural next stage of fighting these regulations and monoplies and IMO Travis would struggle at least as much as Dara in this new battleground.
While a few whales will end up taking and stashing the money away in overseas accounts, lots of it will go for bills to legitimate business and probably mostly to employee salaries.
So at least we get that money distributed among the populace a little bit.