Uber's CEO secretly drove for his own app. What he admitted about the pay is the part drivers should read twice

In September 2022, the chief executive of a company worth tens of billions of dollars created a driver account under a fake name, bought a used Tesla, and started picking up strangers in San Francisco.

Dara Khosrowshahi did about a hundred trips and deliveries as "Dave K." It was an internal project, and it stayed quiet until The Wall Street Journal reported it in April 2023.

What he found was not flattering to his own product. He got tip-baited on bike deliveries. He went to bed worried about protecting his five-star rating. He came away saying the company needed to win drivers' hearts and minds.

Every driver reading that had the same reaction: welcome to the job.

The part neither he nor the app ever fixed is what happens to your money afterwards. There is no employer plan behind a 1099 income, which is why the Solo 401(k) exists.

The number he gave three years later

The more useful moment came in May 2026, when Khosrowshahi sat down with The Verge's Decoder podcast and put a figure on driver pay.

"I do think that driver pay is based on what market rate pay is, essentially," he said. "Nationwide, it's probably $32, $33 per utilized hour. Here in New York City, it's over $50 per utilized hour. Drivers are making decent money. Of course, they're going to want to make more money."

Read that phrase again: per utilized hour.

A utilized hour is time with a passenger or an order in the car. It is not the hour you spent circling an airport queue, or waiting outside a restaurant for a bag that was not ready, or driving home empty at 1am. It does not subtract gas, insurance, depreciation, or the self-employment tax you owe on what is left. Forbes contributor Len Sherman has argued that this style of per-hour figure overstates what drivers actually clear by more than double.

So the honest version of that quote is narrower than it sounds. And underneath it sits something neither number touches.

The thing that is missing from both figures

Whatever a driver earns per hour, none of it arrives with a retirement plan attached.

Khosrowshahi has been unusually direct about this. Back in May 2020 he told CNBC: "I think this system of if you don't work 40 hours, you're not full-time, if you work 40 hours, you're full-time, and then there's this hard break between the two, that's the old world. If you're putting in the hours, you should get minimum earnings based on the hours that you're working and you should get health-care based on the hours that you're working."

That is a chief executive saying the benefits structure around the job does not fit the job. He was arguing for portable benefits. Six years later, the portable retirement account for a 1099 worker is still the one you go out and open yourself.

This is not only a rideshare problem

The Federal Reserve's 2024 household survey found that 20% of American adults did gig work in the prior month, up from 16% in 2021.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted independent contractors at 7.4% of everyone employed in July 2023, the highest reading since the series began in 1995. Their median full-time weekly earnings were $949, against $1,132 for workers in traditional arrangements.

And AARP puts roughly 57 million Americans, about 48% of private-sector workers aged 18 to 64, at an employer that offers no retirement plan at all.

One more number, because it is the one that decides whether saving is easy or hard: 59% of self-employed adults told the Fed their income varies month to month, compared with 28% of people working for someone else.

What a 1099 worker can actually do about it

You cannot make a platform hand you a 401(k). You can open the account it never gave you.

A Solo 401(k) is usually the bigger container. For 2026 you can put away up to $72,000 across the employee and employer sides, or $80,000 if you are 50 or older, with the employee deferral capped at $24,500. Because that deferral does not depend on a percentage of profit, a Solo 401(k) typically lets a lower-earning self-employed person shelter more than a SEP does. Here is how the account works and how to open one.

A SEP IRA is the simpler container. No plan document to adopt, no Form 5500-EZ until the plan gets large, and you can fund it right up to your filing deadline including extensions. The trade-off is that the contribution is employer-side only, roughly 20% of net self-employment earnings. Compare the two side by side before you pick.

Do not wait for your state to cover you. California's auto-IRA mandate now reaches employers of every size, and New York's program is rolling out. Not one of them covers a 1099 contractor, because every one of them runs through an employer's payroll. We wrote up why the self-employed fall through that gap.

Size the contribution before you commit the cash. Irregular income is the real obstacle, not willingness. Run your own numbers in the calculator, then fund the account in your strong months rather than promising yourself a fixed amount every month.

The uncomfortable read

A chief executive drove his own product and concluded the experience needed fixing. He later said drivers make decent money, using a measure that excludes their waiting time and all of their costs. He said years ago that the benefits system around this kind of work belongs to the old world.

All of that can be true at once. What follows from it is simple enough. Nobody is going to open a retirement account on your behalf, and the tax code gives self-employed people more room than most employees ever get.

Gigaverse is pursuing registration as an investment adviser with the SEC and is not currently registered. This article is education, not investment advice, and it is not a recommendation of any particular account for your situation. Accounts are held through a FINRA/SIPC-member broker-dealer. We have no affiliation with Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, or any person quoted here, and none of them endorse Gigaverse.