Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi says he was wrong to call Khashoggi killing a 'mistake'

Uber's chief executive said the murder by Saudi Arabia, a major investor in his company, of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last year could not be excused and that he was wrong to have described the killing as a "serious mistake".

Dara Khosrowshahi was backtracking from comments he made in an interview with "Axios on HBO" aired earlier in which he compared the Washington Post columnist's murder by Saudi agents inside the kingdom's Istanbul consulate to a fatality caused by one of his company's self-driving cars.

"It's a serious mistake. We've made mistakes too, with self-driving, and we stopped driving and we're recovering from that mistake," Khosrowshahi said in the interview. "So I think that people make mistakes. It doesn't mean they can never be forgiven. I think they've taken it seriously..."

Khosrowshahi later said on Twitter: "There's no forgiving or forgetting what happened to Jamal Khashoggi & I was wrong to call it a 'mistake.'"