Uber (Ch)eats

Innovation in tax evasion.

Uber is not a business in the traditional sense. It’s a “bezzle” (“the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it”).

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.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/19/larval-pegasi/#long-con

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:

I. Self-driving cars

II. All buses and subways in the world being scrapped and replaced with Ubers.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#unter

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).

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#unter

Replacing all the world’s transit is also a long-shot. That means that Uber’s bezzle is running out, forcing the company into ever-more-desperate measures to keep money flowing from suckers (“investors”) who believe that a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it.

Measures like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on California’s Proposition 22, which legalized worker misclassification. Measures like rampant wage-theft from drivers. Measures like waging legal wars against whistleblowers.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/texas-lysenko/#unter

Uber’s “innovation” wasn’t self-driving cars. It was cheating. Uber is really fucking good at cheating.

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

https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-tax-avoidance-50-dutch-shell-companies-5-billion-revenue-2021-5