Not so Uber: Bad news keeps coming for travel-hailing company

When Uber CEO Travis Kalanick takes an Uber, he prefers a black car, the high-end service his company introduced in 2010.

On this particular night in early February, Kalanick is perched in the middle seat, flanked by two female friends.

One of his companions appears to say, somewhat inaudibly, that she's heard that Uber is having a hard year. Kalanick retorts, 'I make sure every year is a hard year.” He continues, 'That's kind of how I roll. I make sure every year is a hard year. If it's easy I'm not pushing hard enough.”

It's been a hard year for Kalanick and Uber - or really, a bad year compressed down into an awful three months. The conversation among Kalanick and his friends in the back of an Uber Black devolved into a heated argument over Uber's fares between the CEO and his driver, Fawzi Kamel, who then turned over a dashboard recording of the conversation to Bloomberg.

Kamel, 37, has been driving for Uber since 2011 and wants to draw attention to the plight of Uber drivers. Uber declined to comment on this video.

In December, Uber pulled its self-driving cars off the road in San Francisco after the California Department of Motor Vehicles said they were operating illegally without an autonomous vehicle license. In January, more than 200,000 people uninstalled their accounts after the company was accused of undermining a New York taxi union strike protesting President Donald Trump's refugee ban.

On Feb. 19, a former software engineer at Uber wrote a blog post alleging that she had been propositioned for sex by her manager. On Feb. 23, Alphabet's autonomous car company Waymo sued Uber and its self-driving car company, Otto, accusing an Uber employee of stealing trade secrets by downloading 14,000 files onto an external hard drive.

On Monday, Uber's head of engineering resigned after the company said it learned that he had faced a sexual harassment complaint at Alphabet, his former employer. He denied the allegations.

The company has responded to the former engineer's allegations by hiring the former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate the female software engineer's claims.

Despite it all, Uber's $69 billion company is growing, week after week.