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Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#231

Post by MicroBerto »

ryanfreeborn wrote: post #161
methehack wrote: post #82

I've always been a little confused about uber's capital needs. When I first heard about uber, the part I thought was super-clever was that you wouldn't _need_ lots of capital because all the drivers would have their own cars. Leveraging the latent capital of one side of the two-sided market was the genius of it. (Airbnb too) Same for the staffing -- hook up both sides of the market. No need to pay anyone out of your…

I can't imagine the incessant legal and legislative battles they are fighting are coming cheap. That means hiring legal and policy people, paying a ton of money to outside counsel, lobbying expenses, the hidden costs of building influence. And it's at a huge, because most of this isn't happening at the federal level (yet)—it's all state and city—which means they don't have the luxury of concentrating on the familiar,…

Like spending $8 MILLION in Austin just so they could upset the citizens and lose what should have been an easy battle....

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#232

Post by [deleted] »

tyho wrote: post #25
breitling wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get off your moral high-ground. We (USofA) still continue to execute people as well.

Firstly it's presumptuous to assume craigvn is from the USA. Secondly, the USA does not execute people for witchcraft or apostasy, the same cannot be said of the Saudis [1]. [1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-34982154

[deleted]

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#233

Post by nilkn »

morgante wrote: post #229
nilkn wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked up a fare estimate and UberBlack is about twice as expensive as what I pay. So I suspect you're just as abnormal as me if you pay anyone at all to drive you to the airport instead of driving yourself. That actually drives home my point of not using Uber in this case. Why bother when I'm getting the same service for 50% of the cost with someone I know, trust, and have actually become friends with?

If UberBlack is 2x the price you pay, what you pay is close to 2x what UberX costs (depending on the market). It's fairly normal to take a taxi to the airport (particularly at your destination), but paying 2x the cost of a taxi for a private car service is definitely "luxury."

4x is not the ratio of the prices that I'm seeing from the fare estimator. Regardless, if you want to believe that I'm not normal, that's your prerogative, though I'm not sure what benefit you derive from insisting on this. Additionally I am highly suspect of your implicit claim that you're more "normal" than me if you regularly take Uber to and from the airport. I rarely even fly. If you fly more than twice a year and take Uber each time, you are spending more than me on rides to and from the airport.

Your choice of words is curious to me as well. For instance, you distinguish the limo service I use as being "private". What does that mean in this context, and how is Uber not private? You've misunderstood me if you think I have a personal chauffeur who exclusively works for me. That's not how towncar services work. It's basically just a guy and a few friends who have a tiny company where they drive people to and from the airport.

By the way, I want to point out that Uber's surge pricing could easily make UberX cost more than what I pay. And surge pricing is fairly likely to be in effect any time I'm trying to get to the airport.

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#234

Post by [deleted] »

seizethecheese wrote: post #17
breitling wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get off your moral high-ground. We (USofA) still continue to execute people as well.

Get out of your moral valley, get a better vantage on the moral topology around you. The USA executes people, true, but generally not political opponents. Saudi is an order of magnitude worse than the US government.

[deleted]

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#235

Post by adventured »

eru wrote: post #226
macspoofing wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plenty of people can envision a $100B to $1T valuation at some point. $100B sure. $1T ... maybe if you wait a while to let inflation catch up.

Alphabet, Google's parent and briefly the most valuable company on the planet has a market cap of 510.2B USD right now. And no debt to speak of, I think. Normally you need to add the equity market cap and the debt to get the total financial structure of the company. (I just googled, and I think that sum is called the `enterprise value', if you subtract any cash holdings.) See http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/08/does…

You're talking about one of the most successful companies in the history of business, in Google. Their speed to their present scale in terms of profit - from founding to now - is unprecedented. Add to that that they make most of their money from operating a hyper-margin software service in terms of costs (with nothing at all similar to Uber's drivers and regulatory problems), one that has been almost entirely unregulated (until now) and that also happens to be a quasi-monopoly. Using Google as the standard for what Uber could achieve, is extremely far fetched.

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#236

Post by aetherson »

madebylaw wrote: post #192
morgante wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is a problem, because the moment that people have to pay the actual costs of an Uber ride, they may go back to taxis or driving their own cars. There doesn't seem to be evidence of that. Uber is apparently profitable in its mature markets (mainly the US).[0] The money is mostly used to prop up new markets, where you have to give lots of incentives to get both sides of the market in place fast (keeping supply a…

Uber and Lyft are paying their largest referral bonuses in the "mature" markets (major US cities, e.g. $750 in Chicago recently). They are churning and burning part-time giggers who leave after the bonus is earned or the incentive expires.

Recent Uber and Lyft drivers in SF have both told me that there are big incentives going out to drivers right now. I suppose it's conceivable that somehow the market is none-the-less profitable, but I don't really see how. They were saying like +$10 per ride if they hit the highest tier of payouts.

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#237

Post by eru »

adventured wrote: post #235
eru wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alphabet, Google's parent and briefly the most valuable company on the planet has a market cap of 510.2B USD right now. And no debt to speak of, I think. Normally you need to add the equity market cap and the debt to get the total financial structure of the company. (I just googled, and I think that sum is called the `enterprise value', if you subtract any cash holdings.) See http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/08/does…

You're talking about one of the most successful companies in the history of business, in Google. Their speed to their present scale in terms of profit - from founding to now - is unprecedented. Add to that that they make most of their money from operating a hyper-margin software service in terms of costs (with nothing at all similar to Uber's drivers and regulatory problems), one that has been almost entirely unregul…

Perhaps I was too subtle. That was exactly my point.

(And if you discount my need to look smart, I think I got it across---you had exactly the thought I was intending to create in the reader.)

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#238

Post by toomuchtodo »

bduerst wrote: post #143
dharmon wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the oft-repeated argument in favor of Uber ("they're a logistics company!"), and to be honest, it's quite hand-wavey. Why is the expertise they have built up in car-hailing directly applicable to other logistics problems, and what advantage will they have going in that creates a barrier to entry for newcomers? I think there is one answer to this for Uber, and its the same strategy Amazon stumbled into: have y…

Yep. The reason that's the next predictable response is because Uber is holding off for self-driving cars, so it can become the logistics network for delivery. That doesn't mean that they will, of course. I have a feeling that these platform-locked services like Uber and Lyft will not be able to compete with the scalability of an open auction network.

> I have a feeling that these platform-locked services like Uber and Lyft will not be able to compete with the scalability of an open auction network.

This is the non-profit I want to invest in.

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#239

Post by aetherson »

intrasight wrote: post #155
methehack wrote: post #82

I've always been a little confused about uber's capital needs. When I first heard about uber, the part I thought was super-clever was that you wouldn't _need_ lots of capital because all the drivers would have their own cars. Leveraging the latent capital of one side of the two-sided market was the genius of it. (Airbnb too) Same for the staffing -- hook up both sides of the market. No need to pay anyone out of your…

They hired away almost half of CMUs robotics department. That's gotta be expensive. They are building (in the city no less) an autonomous driving test track/facility. That's also gotta be expensive. Human drivers are just a brief stepping-stone.

Just to be clear:

If you spend $1B on actual physical vehicles or whatever (let's say... 500 $2M vehicles), then if you have 200 employees with an average pay of say $500k per year, then you could pay them all for a decade with another $1B, meaning that you'd have spent less than 1/6th of the funding they've taken to date, or still have $1.5B left of the Saudi Royal Family's hard earned money.

More briefly: no, obviously they are not spending their money on an autonomous driving program.

Re: Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion

#240

Post by cft »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #227
alttab wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got some blood testing machines I'd love to sell you.

While driving home this evening listening to NPR's Marketplace, Kai Ryssdal specifically mentioned that Forbes removed Elizabeth Holems from their list of richest self-made women. Her stake in Theranos is now valued at $0 [1]. Capitalism giveth, and capitalism taketh away. [1] https://news.fastcompany.com/elizabeth-holmess-net-worth-is-...

According to this article her net worth is $400m. That's still a lot of money.
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