babyhueypnewton posted:

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/the-revenue-costs-and-margins-behind-birds-scooters/Anyone in LA knows what a plague these scooter startups are. There are now a bunch all trying to undercut each other for a limited market at best. My dream is that when they all collapse all the scooters get unlocked since at least producing those (in China) is some use value left behind unlike the purely parasitic rideshare companies. It's already happening since the smart imperialists long left behind any use value that could be subject to the limitations of reality:

https://mashable.com/article/e-scooter-hacks-bird-lime/

I finally tried one the other day and it was sort of fun but extremely dangerous. Nobody wears a helmet, you drive either on the road where cars treat your lane as an extra right turn lane or on pedestrian paths since everything currently exists in a space of legal liminality. Also after the huge hassle of finding one that worked and setting up an account, the coupon code didn't work anyway and it was a ripoff.

The other interesting thing is that Softbank lurks behind the scenes of every ridiculous startup, including both Lime and Bird directly and through Uber

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-15/scooter-startups-lime-and-bird-are-said-to-seek-more-funding

What this means for Japanese imperialism going forward I'm not sure, they should have been the nation that opened China and emerged as world hegemon but were incapable of it because of limited sovereignty and the failure of the ruling class which has led to the current systematic chaos. Now they're trying to fill the gaps that Amazon, Google, Apple, etc miss which doesn't seem like a good strategy but is at least superior to Europe's limited horizon of robbing its own periphery and semi-periphery. Maybe they'll get lucky.

some more info on scooters i recently read here, you may be interested bhpn:

https://oversharing.substack.com/p/shared-scooters-dont-last-long

The stock has dropped about 11 percent since Thursday, shaving almost $6 billion from Tesla’s market value. The shares finished Monday at $285.36, the lowest since Oct. 22.

Until last week, Tesla’s store strategy seemed to be one of expansion. The Palo Alto, California-based company opened 27 new retail and service centers last quarter, resulting in 378 locations worldwide, according to its letter to shareholders. It was the most openings for a quarter since mid-2017.

Tesla also suggested a brick-and-mortar retail strategy was important in its annual report filed Feb. 19, just nine days before Musk announced the pivot to online sales.

{...}

Musk described the winding down of many stores as a cost-cutting move that enables Tesla to offer a long-promised $35,000 version of the Model 3 sedan, the automaker’s first mass-manufactured car. The company said it’s able to reduce prices of all its vehicles by an average of about 6 percent by shifting sales online and trimming other expenses.

In an email to employees sent roughly three hours after Tesla published its blog post Thursday, Musk said that 78 percent of Model 3 orders were placed online last year, rather than in stores. He wrote that some jobs will be transitioned to other areas of the business and that “a small number of stores in high-traffic locations will remain as galleries, showcases and Tesla information centers.”

a lot of this kinda feels like circling the drain. like musk can say 80% of sales were online... how many of those people went to check out the car at a tesla store first? just seems really desperate and sudden.

and regarding that 35,000 dollar model 3 (from a recent conference call with journalists):

Chuck Tannert: Good afternoon. What is that Tesla's profit margin on each and every $35,000 Model 3 sold?

Elon Musk: Yeah. We're not going to answer questions like that. Next question

from: https://www.dropbox.com/s/39ncy19q7t2id1r/Tesla%20Call%20Transcript%20%282.28.19%29.pdf?dl=0 (seems to be a large pdf, my shit computer gets very slow, so open at your own risk if ur on a phone or whatever)

The prospectus claims that “within 10 years, our goal is to have deployed a low-cost, scaled autonomous vehicle network that is capable of delivering a majority of the rides on the Lyft platform.” But it provides absolutely no explanation as to why investors should believe that Lyft will be able to more profitably operate much more expensive and risky new technology than the other companies pursuing this (still hypothetical) opportunity. It doesn’t even bother to explain why investors should believe Lyft’s claim that widespread commercial use of AVs will be possible in this timeframe, given that just two years ago Lyft was predicting this would be achieved just two years from now.

Lyft’s IPO is structured so that its current senior executives will get “B” class shares that have 20 times more votes than the “A” class shares the public can buy. Thus anyone buying “A” shares must have complete faith that the current owners can lead the company to sustainable profits and steady equity appreciation. The prospectus provides no explanation as to why investors should have this level of faith in current CEO Logan Green (age 34) or President John Zimmer (age 34), who will control the majority of voting shares.

Tesla’s significant cost-cutting effort has affected employee work schedules and the supply of some small parts used to make vehicles, CNBC reported on Thursday.

CNBC described three cost-reduction measures that Tesla had not made public:

• Asking employees to work remotely and keep travel to a minimum.
  
• Telling hourly employees at the Gigafactory – the factory in Sparks, Nevada, where Tesla makes batteries and drivetrains – to leave in the middle of their shifts and asking them to take paid or unpaid time off.
  
• Reducing the number of some small parts, like rivets and fasteners, available at Tesla’s vehicle-assembly plant in Fremont, California.
  

Citing current and former Tesla employees, CNBC also reported that Tesla had laid off about 8% of its employees in the past week.

nearlyoctober posted:

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

Reducing the number of some small parts, like rivets and fasteners, available at Tesla’s vehicle-assembly plant in Fremont, California.

i don't get it. how does this reduce costs?

not 100% sure but it sounds like trying to get rid of unused inventory. look up "just-in-time" manufacturing. having stuff just laying around for too long isn't good. it could be tesla facing reality that they're not actually going to be making 5,000 cars a week (or whatever the goal was) so might as well get rid of extra small parts.

cars posted:

claiming a bunch of direct online sales that make up for nosediving brick-and-mortar sales is a common tactic nowadays among companies trying to defend numbers that look bad for them. it's easier to hide losses that way, because looking into brick-and-mortar locations, in-house or otherwise, can't prove it wrong. you can audit every physical storefront and still not have enough to refute the claim. if it's combined with other creative bookkeeping, no one can really confirm or disprove it until the company goes belly-up, its value gets reassessed for a buy-out or there's a shareholder revolt.

don't know if that's what's happening with Tesla but it's possible. if so, it's an added incentive for them to sink a bunch of cash into getting a Democrat elected to the presidency, since Tesla such a big target for Republican-friendly media well before Musk's public image took the big hits it did recently, or really before very many people in the U.S. even knew Musk's name. if Tesla can hold out for it, any Democratic Party president is probably going to start drowning them in money from executive agencies again from the day they take office. that might buy Musk and his pals a couple more years to rob the store at least.

for what it's worth (not much), i personally think tesla will declare bankruptcy some time this year. holding onto 2021 seems like a real stretch. if they make it to march 2021 they have a 1.4 billion debt coming due lol.


http://ir.tesla.com/static-files/6db4f56e-1532-4cd6-b8dc-3ffbffe35e26

But this morning, it took hours to get everything lined up. Trading in Lyft shares finally opened a few minutes before noon because that’s how long it took to manipulate the levers to create that “pop” at the start that would make all the headlines within minutes of the “pop.”

And sure enough, minutes later, headlines like “Lyft pops 20% in trading debut…” started making the rounds. That’s all that really mattered. And that’s all anyone remembered.

That “pop” is the amount that shares opened over the already over-inflated IPO offering price of $72 a share, established on Thursday. And so the opening price today of $87.24 represented a beautiful 21% pop for those IPO investors if they could have gotten out at that price. And some were able to.

i don't know what "levers to create that pop" refers to though. media manipulation and hype?

cars posted:

is your podcast going to have this stuff on it.

no, honestly i feel like i dont know about bourgeois finance to discuss it properly. i was thinking about maybe reading that Carreyrou book about Theranos and using that as a platform to discuss things. or maybe if i could pick up any insane hagiography of Musk secondhand. basically find a starting point where i can talk about things without talking about investment banking and immediately showing my ass