You're assuming the current board didn't have this planned for a long time. Let them break the law to get things done, then clean house after the stage was properly set. I
STILL think that people are downplaying the Otto thing way too much, especially on this site.
It's easy to say that they're going to win in court... but this is GOOGLE - they're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and likely a decade trying to win this thing. Google isn't going to stop until they've exhausted literally every legal avenue possible. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a good portion of this isn't Uber's board trying to save the company from that legal battle - fire Kalanick, boot *Gurley, then license the tech from Waymo that was previously stolen.