Really, Uber paid $7,500,000 to "settle" that little dispute -- although his lawyer got a 40% cut, leaving him with "only" $4.5MM. To me, at least, it seems even worse when you think about it that way.

The theory is that you might be inclined to pay in order to avoid a scandal that would be costlier.

For this kind of scandal, my armchair opinion is that you still have to do something at least a bit murky in order to allow yourself to be black mailed.

Agreed. Back when the news of the payoff first became public things were a lot murkier in terms of the broad picture but now that we've had the lid peeled back and we can see a bit more.

It seems a bit more obvious, to me at least, that Uber was and still is doing whatever it can to try to get to final valuation / being bought out / IPO before the severity of the scandal was fully known. I also think that we've reached the point of no return for that matter so I'm definitely interested to see how Uber and this entire debacle winds up.

Perhaps there's an undercurrent of it being easy to spend someone else's 7.5M (ALL of Uber's money is VC money) to avoid the scandal.

Here is one for $32MM

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bill-oreilly-settlement...