171–180 of 213 posts
From Q3 results, it sounded like the company was profitable just on ride-sharing itself and was losing a ton of money on eats + cargo + autonomous vehicles R&D. I wonder what a fair valuation would be for just the ride-sharing business if they were to spin off / shut down every other part of their business and essentially become Lyft.
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Do you really see structural losses when you look at the graph of Tesla’s P/L? I don’t understand how you could interpret the charts that way. That seems like a talking point people parrot who have never looked at the numbers. I mean, this is Tesla and Uber on the same timescale: https://imgur.com/gallery/NOsh4b1 Certainly one of those companies has structural losses.
Yes I see structural losses. Look at the cash flow.
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Volume is extremely important. The 90-day average volume for Uber is ~10-million shares per day. Lets pretend you knew that Uber was going to drop today (last week). How many shares do you sell short? That 10-million average is ALL market trades, buying, selling, etc. etc. If 10-million shares were short-sold, it'd take a full day to cover all of those shares (based on average volume). There's only so much trading ac…
Surely with a lock up date it was pretty predictable that volume would be some large multiple of it's usual.
If you expected 2x or 3x the volume, you were proven wrong in the 1st hour. Between 9am EST to 10am EST, over 40-million UBER shares traded, representing ~400% of the average daily volume in just 1-hour.
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That’s a pretty cynical and inaccurate way of looking at it. They did create hundreds of thousands of part-time to full-time jobs which presumably did not benefit only the 1%. They did drastically lower the price of point-to-point transportation, thereby massively expanding the market for it which presumably did not benefit only the 1%. etc
But all of that was temporary. The jobs go away when Uber falls apart and the cheap point to point transport paid for by VCs is also gone. However the taxi companies that existed are now gone as they could not compete with Uber and the ones that could compete are working for less than before.
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Sure, but the same could be said of Tesla. Horrible employer, constant exec churn, unbelievable cash burn, what appears to be structural losses.... But Tesla still has a 56B mcap today. Uber is 46B. These VC/equity issue cash furnaces can go on longer than most can fathom if a subset of investors believe in the long term vision.
I think part of the issue is market timing. If we went back to June, Tesla is sitting at a $33B market cap after a huge slide. Uber started sliding in August. If we were just looking at market cap, Uber's had been decently stable for 3 months post-IPO and is now sliding. Tesla's would have been at its low point in June. You could have said then, "same could be said... but Uber is sitting at a $71B market cap while Te…
I think Lyft and Uber hurt public transit. There has gotta be a better way to make American cities more livable and accessible without adding additional car traffic. Buses, denser house, better urban planning, metro rail and subway additions are the way we need to go like Asia and Europe. Uber and Lyft are not doing well in Europe and Asia because leaders realize they make traffic worse and are trying to focus on zon…
Uber is still a blessing. Cheaper than cabs, better managed (I can order it anywhere, monitor its progress, don't need to care about payment, ...).
Don't get me wrong, I think the company is pretty shit, but the service is extremely valuable!
Is anyone really surprised? Years before the IPO we knew they were not profitable in the least. We knew VC cash was subsidizing rides. We knew that their future was purely dependent on a self-driving car fleet where they could ditch drivers (and their pay) completely. This on top of a horrible culture with pretty lousy ethics and morality. This is how this was supposed to play out and everyone here (on HN) knew that.…
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Sure, but the same could be said of Tesla. Horrible employer, constant exec churn, unbelievable cash burn, what appears to be structural losses.... But Tesla still has a 56B mcap today. Uber is 46B. These VC/equity issue cash furnaces can go on longer than most can fathom if a subset of investors believe in the long term vision.
I think part of the issue is market timing. If we went back to June, Tesla is sitting at a $33B market cap after a huge slide. Uber started sliding in August. If we were just looking at market cap, Uber's had been decently stable for 3 months post-IPO and is now sliding. Tesla's would have been at its low point in June. You could have said then, "same could be said... but Uber is sitting at a $71B market cap while Te…
Please stop comparing Tesla with car companies. Tesla is a tech company, like Apple iPhone branch (which outlived, say, Nokia and Ericsson and Siemens). Most valuable part of Tesla is their IP and datasets. And don't forget their supercharger network.