Tony Xu, the DoorDash CEO who keeps saying delivery still isn’t good enough

Tony Xu

Born	1985 Nanjing
Occupation	Businessperson

Tony Xu runs the largest delivery app in the United States, and the sentence he returns to most often about it is that it still is not good enough. In grocery, the company’s own letter to shareholders admitted this autumn, the product “still isn’t there” and customers are asked to pay a premium for imperfect delivery. That complaint is how he works. Every fix he proposes, whether a warehouse, a robot or a rival bought outright, makes DoorDash bigger, and every time the size of the company becomes the strongest argument against him.

He has been running toward that problem since he was a boy washing dishes. Xu was four when his parents left Nanjing for Champaign, Illinois, where his father pursued a doctorate at the University of Illinois and his mother, a doctor trained in China, took restaurant work before she could open clinics of her own. He scrubbed plates in the kitchen where she worked. He had arrived as Xu Xun and chose his new first name from television: Tony, after Tony Danza’s character in the sitcom Who’s the Boss?, one of the shows he has credited, along with basketball, with teaching him English.

He studied industrial engineering and operations research at the University of California, Berkeley, where he met his future wife, Patti, at church. The years that followed read like a training plan for a logistics company: an internship at Square, business development for the barcode-scanning app RedLaser, analyst work at McKinsey & Company and strategy roles at eBay and PayPal. He then enrolled in the MBA program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, graduating in 2013.

At Stanford in 2012, Xu and three classmates, Andy Fang, Evan Moore and Stanley Tang, launched a bare-bones delivery website called PaloAltoDelivery.com. The founders carried the orders themselves. By May 2013 the project was DoorDash, with Xu as chief executive and a director, roles he has held ever since. While rivals fought over dense city centres, DoorDash went after the suburbs and the big restaurant chains, and by the time the pandemic shut dining rooms it had the network to absorb the rush. The initial public offering in December 2020 made Xu a billionaire in his mid-thirties.

The years after the listing tested the habit of expansion. DoorDash agreed to buy the Finnish delivery company Wolt in an all-stock deal announced at about $8.1 billion; by the time it closed in 2022, the fall in DoorDash’s own share price had cut the recorded purchase price to roughly $2.8 billion. That November the company laid off 1,250 corporate employees, and Xu told staff in an email that DoorDash had not been as strict about the growth of its teams as it should have been. Losses of $1.37 billion in 2022 turned into the company’s first full year of net profit, $123 million, in 2024. Since January 2022 he has also sat on the board of Meta.

The harder questions concern the people who do the driving. In 2020 DoorDash joined Uber, Lyft and Instacart in spending around $200 million on Proposition 22, the California ballot measure that kept app couriers classed as independent contractors rather than employees; voters approved it. In February 2025 the New York attorney general announced a $16.75 million settlement over DoorDash’s practice, between 2017 and 2019, of using customer tips to cover base pay it had already guaranteed to couriers, restitution meant for some 63,000 workers in the state. That same month Uber sued DoorDash in California, accusing it of pressuring restaurants into exclusive delivery deals with threats of higher commissions; DoorDash called the claims unfounded. The arguments around the company end, in practice, with one man. Counting shares whose votes are pledged to him, Xu controlled about 55 percent of DoorDash’s voting power according to the company’s 2026 proxy statement.

The expansion has not slowed. In October 2025 DoorDash completed its takeover of the British delivery group Deliveroo, valued at about £2.9 billion. Days earlier Xu had presented Dot, a small autonomous delivery robot built by DoorDash Labs and designed to use roads, bike lanes and sidewalks, with a first pilot in the Phoenix area. In the third quarter of 2026 the company handled 993 million orders, up 28 percent, on revenue of $4.6 billion and net income of $466 million. Asked on the earnings call about artificial intelligence agents that order food for their users, Xu said such assistants had placed only several hundred orders in total and warned analysts that “you don’t want to be delusional” about the trend.

The same week brought his largest bet. On October 28, 2026, DoorDash signed an agreement to buy Instacart for $65 a share, about $17 billion, at least three-quarters of it in cash and backed by a JPMorgan bridge loan. Xu’s case, set out in the shareholder letter, is that grocery delivery only improves when someone controls the inventory, and that warehouses are a fixed-cost business that needs Instacart’s volume to pay off. Consumer and labour groups, among them the American Economic Liberties Project and the Groundwork Collaborative, have urged the Federal Trade Commission to block the deal. The companies expect it to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028, subject to an Instacart shareholder vote and approvals in the United States, Canada and Israel.

Away from the company, Xu lives in San Francisco with Patti, whom he married in 2013, and their two children. The couple have signed the Giving Pledge and given to Berkeley, Northwestern and Asian American and Pacific Islander causes. He used to run marathons and calls himself an avid Golden State Warriors fan.

What comes next is a long wait in front of antitrust regulators, and the review will test his favourite argument directly. Xu says DoorDash needs Instacart’s scale to make grocery delivery as good as it should be. The people deciding the case will be asking whether a company that already handles most of the country’s delivery orders should be allowed to become the place where Americans buy their groceries too.

Tags: business, ceos, business leaders, Instacart, DoorDash, Tony Xu