One cab company Uber alles

Read it if you want to.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Don't worry, the titans of capitalism will save the world

The rise and catastrophic downfall of WeWork founder and former CEO Adam Neumann has been chronicled in gleeful detail across the international financial press in the wake of his company’s ill-fated attempt at a public offering — which resulted in disastrous revelations about the company’s mismanagement, its devaluation and, ultimately, Neumann’s resignation.

But a new Vanity Fair article by Gabriel Sherman, titled “Inside the Fall of WeWork,” asserts that Neumann’s “millennial entitlement gone insane” and guru-like “egomaniacal glamour” extended beyond the business world and into the world of Middle East diplomacy.

[...]

Last summer, some WeWork executives were shocked to discover Neumann was working on Jared Kushner’s Mideast peace effort. According to two sources, Neumann assigned WeWork’s director of development, Roni Bahar, to hire an advertising firm to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like.”

Kushner, he added, “showed a version of the video during his speech at the White House’s peace conference in Bahrain last summer.”

Sherman reported that Neumann also told his colleagues “that he was saving the women of Saudi Arabia by working with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to offer women coding classes.”

Finally, an anecdote that connected Neumann both to Kushner and the Saudi prince involved a claim by Neumann that three people were going to save the world: Crown Prince Mohammed, Jared Kushner and Neumann himself.

  Haaretz

What do you want to bet Kushner and the Crown Prince agree?

After all the WeWork scandal in the news, I still had to look up just WTF the company is. According to Wikipedia:

WeWork is an American commercial real estate company that provides shared workspaces for technology startups and services for other enterprises.

And saves the world, of course.

You might have heard of Adam Neumann, the grifter mastermind behind WeWork, a failing real estate company that claims to be worth many billions.

  The Guardian

I know that person under a different name: Donald J Trump.

Neumann, like Mark Zuckerberg or Travis Kalanick, Uber’s founder, is another offspring of Silicon Valley’s slash and destroy culture, reaping great wealth off a startup that was either actively corrosive or merely unnecessary.

After a disastrous public offering that forced Neumann out, WeWork, which rents office spaces from landlords and refurbishes them as tony workspaces for customers, announced this week it would lay off 2,400 employees. The cuts represent 19% of its workforce. Neumann, the former CEO, was set to walk away with a $1.7bn golden parachute. [...] Backlash from WeWork’s beleaguered employees may trim the deal – Softbank, the Japanese conglomerate that has been propping WeWork up with investment cash, could cut some of Neumann’s benefits.

But either way, he will exit the company he built a very wealthy millionaire or technical billionaire. He will never want for anything again. The same can’t be said for the 2,400 about to be unemployed.

The WeWork story is now a disturbingly familiar one, in an era when the economics of major startups can seem as surreal and ludicrous as whatever happens in the White House. Capitalism has always been a deeply flawed way of arranging a society, but big business, until around the 21st century, was at least bound by a few basic laws of monetary gravity. You were successful when you produced more revenue than the cost of running the business. You expanded when your profit margins increased.

[...]

Ford or US Steel or IBM could not just lose money and indefinitely survive. Their stock would plummet. Headquarters and factories would shutter.

Those days are gone.

While a few of the tech behemoths, like Amazon, Facebook and Google, do indeed turn profits, many others don’t come close. In the startup world, the logic is inverted, the math alchemic. You are worth the appeal of your idea to a bunch of rich people and companies who will keep giving you money in the hope that one day a fiction will be made real. You can keep losing money at spectacular rates as long as you, like a junkie after the next quick fix, keep expanding, at whatever maniacal clip the market justifies.

[...]

Uber is far more nefarious, driving down the wages of drivers and clogging city streets with unsustainable levels of traffic. It’s an unregulated cab company helmed by vulture capitalists.

And just lost its license to operate in London.

WeWork is comparatively benign: a lousy real estate company, conceived by Neuman, that tricked a lot of people into thinking it was something more.

[...]

WeWork’s initial public offering showed it burned through billions a year, racking up huge losses as it continued to rent out office space in just about every city imaginable.

The business model, if it can be called that, is vulnerable to economic downturns, since WeWork is locked into long-term leases with its landlords. Tenants of WeWork can more easily walk away if business goes sour. But WeWork can’t exit a 10-year lease from an office building if a space suddenly goes vacant.

SoftBank doesn't have a savvy lending department? Or is this a friend-of-Jared-Kushner thing?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Union busting

That's rich

Banned from the app?  Does Uber think that's going to be a problem?

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Capitalism at Its Finest

The secretive ride-hailing giant Uber rarely discusses internal matters in public. But in March, facing crises on multiple fronts, top officials convened a call for reporters to insist that Uber was changing its culture and would no longer tolerate “brilliant jerks.”

Notably, the company also announced that it would fix its troubled relationship with drivers, who have complained for years about falling pay and arbitrary treatment.

“We’ve underinvested in the driver experience,” a senior official said. “We are now re-examining everything we do in order to rebuild that love.”

  NYT

Rebuild the love.

I've obviously missed at least some of the Uber complaints, because I wasn't aware of their issue with "brilliant jerks".

And yet even as Uber talks up its determination to treat drivers more humanely, it is engaged in an extraordinary behind-the-scenes experiment in behavioral science to manipulate them in the service of its corporate growth.

Continue reading.

Uber needs help.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

He Forgot Who Works in the Tech Industry

The tension over continuing to work with Mr. Trump reached a breaking point at Uber because [CEO Travis] Kalanick was, until Thursday, one of the most vocal proponents among tech chiefs of engaging with the president. As recently as Saturday, Mr. Kalanick had publicly said in a blog post that the best route forward was to have “a seat at the table.”

[...]

He had joined Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council in December. After the immigration order against refugees and seven Muslim-majority countries, many staff members wondered why Mr. Kalanick was still willing to advise the president.

[...]

Outside of the internal pressure, Uber faced other fallout from Mr. Kalanick’s stance. More than 200,000 customers had deleted their accounts.

[...]

Lyft, another ride-hailing service, pledged to donate $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union and has seen its app shoot toward the top of the download charts.

[...]

On Thursday, Mr. Kalanick [stepped] down from Mr. Trump’s economic advisory council.

[...]

Facebook employees have voiced frustration that Peter Thiel, the billionaire tech investor and adviser to Mr. Trump, still has a seat on the social network’s board. At Google, employees have staged protests against the immigration order. At Twitter’s headquarters, some employees have said they are uneasy about the president’s heavy reliance on their service to send divisive messages.

  NYT

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Uber Supports Trump, Among Other Bad Practices

Some people didn't like that.

Also...O'Hare protest:

Also, San Francisco..

And in DC...

And in Denver...

Also, Free Market

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Welcome to the Deregulated Capitalist World

If it's good enough for oil companies, it's good enough for Uber drivers.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Enjoy Your Uber While You Can

An obvious but rarely asked question is: whose cash is Uber burning? With investors like Google, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs behind it, Uber is a perfect example of a company whose global expansion has been facilitated by the inability of governments to tax profits made by hi-tech and financial giants.

[...]

[T]his money is parked in the offshore accounts of Silicon Valley and Wall Street firms.

[...]

Some of these firms do choose to share their largesse with governments – both Apple and Google have agreed to pay tax bills far smaller than what they owe, in Italy and the UK respectively – but such moves aim at legitimising the questionable tax arrangements they have been using rather than paying their fair share.

[...]

While you might be tempted to ascribe the low costs of the service to its ingenuity and global scale – is it the Walmart of transport? – its affordability has a more banal provenance: sitting on tons of investor cash, Uber can afford to burn billions in order to knock out any competitors.

[...]

Uber’s game plan is simple: it wants to drive the rates so low as to increase demand – by luring some of the customers who would otherwise have used their own car or public transport. And to do that, it is willing to burn a lot of cash, while rapidly expanding into adjacent industries, from food to package delivery.

  Guardian

And once they have driven (literally) out the competition, the rates are going to rise, as sure as you're sitting here reading this.

I'm assuming they've addressed their drivers' grievances, but I could be wrong.  In France, they've generously offered to allow any taxi drivers who are being driven out of business a second job driving for Uber.  Once they've succeeded in driving them out of business, there may be no other work for them, and then...well, we call that 'over a barrel'.  I'm not sure why.  But I know that when you are 'over a barrel', you don't have any bargaining leverage.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

Taxes Schmaxes

Surely we don't care if a corporation doesn't pay its taxes!  Why should Uber be held to a different standard than, say General Motors or Merck Pharmaceuticals?



How Uber plays the tax shell game (Brian O'Keefe, Marty Jones @ Fortune)

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.