2016, he was one of the highest paid CEOs in the United States. During his tenure as CEO of Expedia, "the gross value of its hotel and other travel bookings more than quadrupled and its pre-tax earnings more than doubled." Under Khosrowshahi, Expedia extended its presence to more than 60 countries and acquired Travelocity, Orbitz, and HomeAway. In August 2017, Khosrowshahi became the CEO of Uber, succeeding founder Travis Kalanick. He was initially viewed as a "dark horse" candidate in case the initial frontrunners, General Electric's Jeff Immelt and Hewlett Packard Enterprise's Meg Whitman, fell through. However, when Immelt flubbed his presentation, Immelt's initial supporters threw their backing to Khosrowshahi. This included Kalanick, even though Khosrowshahi had made clear that under his watch, Kalanick would have no role in Uber's daily operations; as he put it in one of his slides, "there cannot be two CEOs." After several deadlocked votes, Benchmark, a venture capital firm that had helped lead the effort to push out Kalanick, promised to drop a lawsuit against Kalanick if it named Whitman as CEO. Several of the directors read the announcement as blackmail. One of Whitman's supporters switched his vote to Khosrowshahi, breaking the deadlock and making him Uber's second full-time CEO. He forfeited his un-vested stock options of Expedia, then worth $184 million, but Uber reportedly paid him over $200 million to take the CEO position. He also serves on Uber's board of directors. Khosrowshahi's main task was to clean up the image of a company that had become one of the most despised in the country, in part due to revelations about Uber's corporate culture. He replaced Kalanick's once-inviolable 14 values, which contained such items as "super pumped" and "always be hustlin'," with eight values focusing on "customer obsession". At all of his public appearances after taking over, Khosrowshahi stressed the message, "We do the right thing. Period." In May 2019, Khosrowshahi led Uber in its initial public offering, which he addressed with employees in a company-wide letter. Khosrowshahi is on the list of "Prominent Iranian-Americans" published by the U.S. Virtual Embassy Iran. Political activity Khosrowshahi is an outspoken critic of the immigration policy of Donald Trump. In 2016, he donated to the Hillary Victory Fund, Washington Democratic Senator Patty Murray, and the Democratic National Committee. He also donated to Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee, a supporter of libertarianism. In November 2019, Khosrowshahi caused