Five weeks after Uber Technologies Inc. co-founder Travis Kalanick resigned from the company following ongoing sexual harassment scandals, Expedia Inc. Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi has been named the ride-hailing giant’s new CEO, according to reports published Sunday.

Recode, citing unnamed sources, noted that Khosrowshahi (pictured) was a dark-horse candidate for the position, one whose name was not leaked as a possibility until now. The report was confirmed by other publications such as the New York Times and Axios.

According to the reports, Khosrowshahi was chosen as a compromise candidate after the board could not agree on either former General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt or current Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. CEO Meg Whitman, who in recent weeks had twice denied she would be leaving HPE for Uber.

Whitman was said to be the Uber board’s “favored candidate” as late as early afternoon Sunday until the news of Khosrowshahi’s appointment was leaked. According to Recode, the venture capital firm Benchmark, which recently sued Kalanick for fraud, had backed Whitman and Kalanick had favored Immelt.

Khosrowshahi, an Iranian-American businessman, has been Expedia’s CEO since August 2005. Before that, he had worked for Barry Diller’s IAC/Interactive Corp., of which Expedia was a part before spinning out in 2015. Married to actress Sydney Shapiro, Khosrowshahi oversaw a period of rapid growth for the former Microsoft Corp.-owned company, including the acquisition of competitors such as Orbitz Worldwide Inc. in 2015.

He is also known for not being fond of social media, with a report in January 2016 naming him as one of a number of CEOs who doesn’t play ball with social sharing – an interesting background given much of Uber’s marketing push has been related to pushing its product in this manner.

However, he hasn’t been especially shy about his political views. At the end of an earnings report in February, he closed with this gloomy comment: “Hopefully we will all be alive to see the end of next year.” It seemed to be an oblique reference to President Trump, whose travel ban to various Muslim countries, including Khosrowshahi’s native Iran, Expedia opposed in a legal challenge.

As of Sunday evening, Uber had not officially confirmed the appointment. The company said that “the Board has voted and will announce the decision to the employees first.”

The new CEO faces a raft of challenges, including Kalanick’s desire to stay in a position of power and active lobbying of Uber’s board to do so. With Uber’s go-go culture that appears to have gotten out of control, Khosrowshahi will have to try to alter that culture to avoid further problems while also allowing executives and employees to remain highly aggressive in the face of tough competition from main U.S. rival Lyft Inc. and a raft of overseas rivals. He also needs to hire a number of executives, such as chief operating officer and chief financial officer, to fill holes created by a number of departures.

Photo: LinkedIn