What made HR act in this way? They clearly felt they were protecting the company by firing this person, but they've done nothing wrong and it's unclear they posed any kind of threat to the company. Certainly the complaint about his co-worker would not be perceived as a threat.

I will give some weight to the possibility that Uber HR are utterly disfunctional, but on balance I'm left with the impression there's more to this story than we're being told.