This #VenturePredation let investors - like #PrinceBoneSaw - cash out to suckers, leaving behind a money-losing business that had to invent ever-sweatier accounting tricks and implausible narratives to keep the suckers on the line while they blew town. A bezzle, in other words:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy
Uber is a true bezzle innovator, coming up with all kinds of fairy tales and sci-fi gimmicks to explain how they would convert their money-loser into a profitable business.
5/
They spent $2.5b on #SelfDrivingCars, producing a vehicle whose mean distance between fatal crashes was *half a mile*. Then they paid another company *$400 million* to take this self-licking ice-cream cone off their hands:
Amazingly, self-driving cars were among the *more* plausible of Uber's plans.
6/
They pissed away hundreds of millions on California's #Prop22 to institutionalize worker misclassification, only to have the rule struck down because they couldn't be bothered to draft it properly. Then *they did it again* in Massachusetts:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/15/simple-as-abc/#a-big-ask
Remember when Uber was going to plug the holes in its balance sheet with *flying cars*? Flying cars!
7/
