{"id":200311,"date":"2021-05-14T19:07:00","date_gmt":"2021-05-15T00:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/14\/a-perfect-metaphor-for-american-startup-culture\/"},"modified":"2021-05-14T19:07:00","modified_gmt":"2021-05-15T00:07:00","slug":"a-perfect-metaphor-for-american-startup-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2021\/05\/14\/a-perfect-metaphor-for-american-startup-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"A Perfect Metaphor for American Startup Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

It should surprise no one that gypsy cab company Uber is less of a ride sharing company than it is an exercise in fraud<\/a>.  <\/p>\n

By this, I don’t mean that it has no path to profitability (though it doesn’t), I mean that Uber, and WeWork, DoorDash, and pretty much the entire investment portfolio of Softbank is an attempt to generate buzz through a massive infusion of capital, followed by an IPO that offloads the company to suckers<\/a>. <\/p>\n

It seems to me that in addition to those startups, the management of Softbank should be frog-marched out of their offices in handcuffs when the reckoning comes. <\/p>\n

It also turns out that Uber is an example of particularly extreme financial engineering: <\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n

Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It’s a “bezzle” (“the magic interval when a confidence <\/p>\n

trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”). <\/p>\n

The only reason Uber was able to attain growth was because investors gave it billions to lose. First, it was the Saudi Royals, hoping to spend their way to a transportation monopoly.<\/p>\n

When that didn’t work, the company’s investors suckered the public into taking their shares off their hands in an IPO premised on two things:
<\/span> <\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Self-driving cars\n

    <\/span> <\/li>\n

  2. All buses and subways in the world being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.<\/span> <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Neither of those things have happened, of course. Uber actually had to pay someone else $400m to “buy” the self-driving car division it sank $2.5b into (the resulting cars could not travel for one mile without a serious accident).
    <\/span> <\/p>\n

    \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

    Uber’s “innovation” wasn’t self-driving cars. It was cheating. Uber is really f%$#ing good at cheating.<\/p>\n

    How good? Well, last year, Uber managed to dodge tax on $6b in global revenues by laundering its income through fifty Dutch shell companies.<\/span> <\/p>\n

    \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

    It’s quite a whirlwind of socially useless financial engineering, composed of obvious frauds like “selling” its IP to a Dutch subsidiary financed with a $16b “loan” from a Singaporean subsidiary, garnering 20 years<\/i>‘ worth of $1b annual tax credits.<\/span> <\/p>\n

    The Netherlands may be a bastion of progressive politics, but it’s also one of the world’s leading onshore-offshore tax havens, joining Cyprus, Luxembourg, Delaware, Wyoming and the City of London as a key player in the global money-laundry.<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

    Our multinational financial system is one big case of, “If fraud can happen, it will already have happened.”<\/p>\n

    If we actually enforced the tax and fraud laws, there would be millions of people nationwide who would be in the dock right now. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    It should surprise no one that gypsy cab company Uber is less of a ride sharing company than it is an exercise in fraud.  By this, I don’t mean that it has no path to profitability (though it doesn’t), I mean that Uber, and WeWork, DoorDash, and pretty much the entire investment portfolio of Softbank …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,969,1004,1278,983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-200311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-evil","category-finance","category-fraud","category-taxes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200311"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}