Dara Khosrowshahi, the Iranian-American businessman who was once a refugee and is now the CEO of the holiday booking company Expedia, confused the crowd at his fourth-quarter earnings call address on Thursday when he made a strange and somewhat controversial comment about the end of the world.
Made the comment in his closing remarks
When Khosrowshahi was asking to make his final, closing remarks after a long speech about the company and its financial intake and a pep talk about how to shake things up in the coming year, yada yada yada, he made the closing statement that one might expect, congratulating his employees worldwide for doing a great job and for giving Expedia its best year yet in 2016, and then he turned some heads by adding, “Hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year,” before exiting the stage and leaving everybody in the room dumbstruck.
CNBC has contacted Expedia in order to get some kind of clarification on what Khosrowshahi said, but a spokesperson quite simply responded that the Travel company and its people did not have “anything additional to share,” suggesting that the remarks made by Khosrowshahi are self-explanatory, and many Twitter users are taking what he said as a jibe at the controversial US President Donald Trump and inferred that Khosrowshahi was predicting Trump will kick off a conflict that will lead to the end of the world (or perhaps, knowing ISIS, he already has).
One Twitter user called Khosrowshahi a “Trump critic” amid a barrage of other tweets who see his comments as a critique of the President of the United States.
A man named Ian Yates tweeted that there was “a new Risk Factor for the prospectuses,” and added a laughing face emoji. Perhaps he is mocking a businessman for getting involved in politics, but if he’s a Trump supporter, he probably shouldn’t be playing that card.
Khosrowshahi is known to be anti-Trump
While it’s pretty much a given that someone who is part Iranian and part American would be against an American President who wants to ban Iranians from the country, Khosrowshahi has shown his anti-Trump stance by taking action against him in the past.
Khosrowshahi and Expedia supported a lawsuit against Trump’s Muslim travel ban. Khosrowshahi tweeted of the decision to support it that he and his company were “standing up for our travelers and our immigrant roots.” Of course he’s against the travel ban, because it would prevent refugees from achieving the same success that he did.
