Uber everywhere
Taxi battle royale
Good morning my priceless Ming vases. This is your Stock Market Rundown for June 16, 2023.
TODAY’S TOP STORY: THE RIDESHARING KINGS VS. THE TAXI PRINCE 🚕
It’s lowkey wild how Uber swanned into every urban market on God’s green earth, cavalierly disregarded rules and laws governing taxis, and transformed our lives.
Yeah, Travis Kalanick was hella problematic, but there’s no denying he made life easier and more fun for those of us in the big cities.
Make no mistake, Uber hemorrhages money—before its IPO, the business was basically a machine to transfer value from venture capitalists to us riders going from Point A to Point B in the backseat of a late-model Hyundai. Thanks, Softbank! Now as a public company, has an $88B market cap, but it’s still burning cash.
You’re not old enough to remember this, anon, but taxis used to be grubby, inconvenient, and annoying. When I was your age, we’d call the taxi dispatch number with our Nokia flip phone, and just… wait and pray for the cab to show up. Abject torture.
Even now, Uber has barriers to its juggernaut of world takeover. The company has been shut out of Japan by Ichiro Kawanabe, the chairman of Japan’s biggest taxi company. His upstart taxi-hailing app controls three-quarters of the market, thanks to his elite connections and home-grown knowledge of the Japanese environment.
Maybe, as in Japan, traditional North American taxi companies could’ve beaten Uber at their own game if they’d absorbed the lessons of the disruptive innovator.
Alas, they were too slow: in NYC, since the advent of ridesharing, the auction value of taxi medallions (which give drivers the right to operate) plummeted from $1 million to near-zilch. Lesson: never assume a monopoly is an perennial entitlement.
SO WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON?
This is how much Americans think you need to be rich. Pshaw. You could barely fuel the PJ once a month on that.
Physically attractive fund managers “lure more investments and enjoy more promotions”, according to some sketchy study that probably won’t replicate. Pro tip: hot people work in the back office.
Google’s attitude towards having to pay millions to Eurocrats for privacy violations is approximately the same as a normal person’s attitude towards having to put change in a parking meter: mild irritation, quicky forgotten.
Speaking of Google, in yet another incomprehensible strategic misstep, they just sold Google Domains to Squarespace. CEO Sundar Pichai appears committed to maintaining the tech giant’s reputation for keeping products in perennial beta and rug-pulling anybody dumb enough to rely on them.
An 80s throwback shoulder-fired missile with the badass name “Starstreak” is being brought back into production after its deployment in Ukraine made military procurement guys worldwide say “hot damn, I’ll take five thousand of those suckers.” Makes an ideal father’s day gift.
That’s it for today, see you bright and early Monday morning. Yours in capitalism, The Axe