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> That's really what people care about in these discussions. Its not "Will Uber be profitable this quarter?", its... "should I buy Uber stock?". It's definitel

> That's really what people care about in these discussions. Its not "Will Uber be profitable this quarter?", its... "should I buy Uber stock?". It's definitely not what I care about. I'm just a user, not an investor. What I care about is whether I'll still be able to use the service in the long run, albeit at higher prices. Also, if that's what people making these arguments really care about, then I think it's misleading for them to be arguing that Uber can never be profitable and is destined to go out of business. That is not the same thing as being a poor stock market buy at current valuations, whether the latest round of investors will lose money, and so on.

dragontamer 5y ago
Maybe you're not the target audience of the blogpost then? The blogpost is pretty clear to be coming in from an angle of "stockholders" perspective. > Uber didn't need self-driving cars – it needed us to think it would have self-driving cars. That way the company's Saudi owners could raise investment capital from subsequent "investors" (AKA "suckers") all the way up to the IPO, cash out, and walk away, whistling innocently. > That's the bezzle at work – a dazzle op that keeps new money flowing in, convincing people that a pile of shit this big must have a pony beneath it. But as the years went by, the stories that Uber told us about its path to profitability got more and more fanciful. The big gist of this entire blog post is "Hey Stockholders, I think you've been swindled by Uber's CEO". That's the thesis in a nutshell. If you don't care about the stockholder perspective, that's fine and dandy. I'm not saying you should care. (I'm not a shareholder, so I certainly don't care very much). But... as someone who does participate in the stock market, I still find these stories fascinating. I probably will be buying stocks in the near future, so I do want to know about all of this drama going on in different companies.
- ghaff 5y ago
  There was a whole lot of some combination of self-delusion and grift going on around self-driving and not just with respect to Uber. Even if you made some very optimistic assumptions around the tech, I'm not sure it ever moved the cost needle as much as people assuming it made taxi rides almost too cheap to meter thought it would.

dragontamer 5y ago

Maybe you're not the target audience of the blogpost then? The blogpost is pretty clear to be coming in from an angle of "stockholders" perspective. > Uber didn't need self-driving cars – it needed us to think it would have self-driving cars. That way the company's Saudi owners could raise investment capital from subsequent "investors" (AKA "suckers") all the way up to the IPO, cash out, and walk away, whistling innocently. > That's the bezzle at work – a dazzle op that keeps new money flowing in, convincing people that a pile of shit this big must have a pony beneath it. But as the years went by, the stories that Uber told us about its path to profitability got more and more fanciful. The big gist of this entire blog post is "Hey Stockholders, I think you've been swindled by Uber's CEO". That's the thesis in a nutshell. If you don't care about the stockholder perspective, that's fine and dandy. I'm not saying you should care. (I'm not a shareholder, so I certainly don't care very much). But... as someone who does participate in the stock market, I still find these stories fascinating. I probably will be buying stocks in the near future, so I do want to know about all of this drama going on in different companies.

ghaff 5y ago
There was a whole lot of some combination of self-delusion and grift going on around self-driving and not just with respect to Uber. Even if you made some very optimistic assumptions around the tech, I'm not sure it ever moved the cost needle as much as people assuming it made taxi rides almost too cheap to meter thought it would.