In the UK, for instance, Uber has just lost its first appeal against an employment tribunal verdict that ruled a group of its drivers are workers,
not self-employed contractors — and are therefore entitled to benefits such as holiday pay.

Uber has said that if it has to fund such benefits for all ~50,000 of its local drivers it would cost it “tens of millions” of pounds.

The UK government is also looking at changing employment law to reflect “modern” gig economy platform work — and will clearly be keen to protect its own tax takings which have been dented by an algorithmically accelerated boom in ‘self-employment’.

uk government looking at changing laws to reflect "modern" (yet failing) businesses. nice one.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 (Dec. 20, 2017 11:16:50)

What are your thoughts on Softbank’s tender offer of $32.96 per share? Do you think it will go up to be more in line with the $70 billion valuation?

TUSK: It’s a low blow. It’s obviously art and not science. I worry a little bit that the timing of the data breach story hit really close to the tender offer and might have served as an excuse to offer a lower price. The economics of the company are really strong and really bright, so I don’t know that at $33 a share, they’ll be able to fill their $8 billion . I think they’re going have to come up, and if I had to guess, it ends up somewhere in the low $50s. I’ll take advantage of this tender offer at the right price.

dunno if this guy is delusional or just pushing a hard PR line.

China's ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing has raised over $4 billion in its latest round of funding, the company said on Thursday, posing a challenge to its U.S. rival Uber in its efforts to branch out overseas.

The latest investment values Didi at over $50 billion, according to Reuters, and equips it with the cash needed to aggressively pursue expansion opportunities abroad.

{...}

Didi said the fundraising attracted both Chinese and international investors.

Softbank of Japan said in an email to CNBC that it participated in the funding. The company did not disclose how much it invested.

Abu Dhabi state fund Mubadala Capital also invested in the funding round, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing sources. Mubadala did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment.

funding has basically dried up for uber but the money is apparently still flowing freely for didi (4 billion raised just recently) and lyft (1 billion raised from google about 2 months ago). seems like a lot of investors might have taken the wrong messages from uber's failings, thinking that the problem is with uber specifically rather than the entire rideshare model. looking forward to news about softbank's potential investment with uber which i think is due in a week.

Employees and institutional investors each have to decide whether that share price — a 30 percent discount from the company’s last valuation — is enough of a payout. If the SoftBank-led group is unable to cobble together at least 13.4 percent of the shares in the company, then the transaction fails and Uber’s governance crisis would deepen.

But on the eve of the deadline, Uber investors confess to little knowledge about whether enough employees or major shareholders have turned in documents volunteering to sell. Why? Because the anti-collusion mandate — a “gag order” in the eyes of some — means that Uber’s owners can’t tell one another whether they’re selling.

should find out in about 14 hours

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

delivering 101,312 vehicles

As minuscule as this amount is in the scheme of things it stills seems artificially high. I don't think I've ever seen a Tesla in my life despite living in a major metropolitan city with a decent tech presence.

Former Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick, who has long boasted that he’s never sold any shares in the company he co-founded, plans to sell about 29 percent of his stake in the ride-hailing company, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Kalanick stands to reap about $1.4 billion from the transaction with SoftBank Group Corp. and a consortium of investors who have agreed to buy equity valuing Uber at $48 billion, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private negotiations. Kalanick, who owns 10 percent of the company, had offered to sell as much as half of his stake -- the maximum board members were allowed to tender. He had to pare back the amount because of limits outlined in the agreement between Uber and the buyers, the people said.

One of the wealthiest people in the world on paper, Kalanick would become an actual billionaire for the first time as a result of the sale.

Uber's former CEO Travis Kalanick tendered 50 percent of his stake in Uber, the maximum allowed for board members. He's selling 29 percent since the round was oversubscribed.

He'll make about $1.4 billion https://t.co/jzZC7VLaF1

— Eric Newcomer (@EricNewcomer) January 5, 2018

The embattled blood-testing startup told investors on Friday that it had raised $US100 million in a secured debt financing transaction from Fortress Investment Group. The financing is subject to product and operational milestones, and includes warrants for 4% of the company equity. Fortress was acquired by SoftBank earlier this year.

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/benchmark-sold-900-million-of-its-uber-stock-but-wanted-to-sell-more-2018-1?r=US&IR=T

The risk was that shareholders wouldn’t offer enough of their shares at the discounted price to satisfy Softbank.

But in the end, investors were tripping over themselves to cash out at that price. Even ousted CEO Travis Kalanick, who had previously boasted that he never sold any shares, is selling about one-third of his stake worth, about $US1.4 billion, Bloomberg reports.

Then a top executive excused herself to answer a phone call. A minute later, she reappeared and asked Kalanick to step into the hallway. Another executive joined them. They hunched over a laptop to watch a video that had just been posted online by Bloomberg News: grainy, black-and-white dashcam footage of Kalanick in the back seat of an UberBlack on Super Bowl weekend, heatedly arguing over fares with a driver named Fawzi Kamel.

“Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit!” Kalanick can be heard yelling at Kamel. “They blame everything in their life on somebody else!”

As the clip ended, the three stood in stunned silence. Kalanick seemed to understand that his behavior required some form of contrition. According to a person who was there, he literally got down on his hands and knees and began squirming on the floor. “This is bad,” he muttered. “I’m terrible.”

Kalanick was unable or unwilling to right himself. If anything, his judgment deteriorated. He decided that he should apologize privately to Kamel, the driver he berated on video. The plan was simple: meet with Kamel at some neutral and nonthreatening location, engage in five minutes of pleasantries, say sorry, and leave.

The meeting went on for more than an hour, with Kalanick re-debating Kamel over Uber’s pricing policies. Somehow, by the end, Kalanick suggested that he give the driver Uber stock, according to people familiar with the discussion.

Wayne Ting, who ran Uber’s San Francisco business, was in the room with Kalanick and Kamel. In an email later circulated among employees and directors, Ting said he was deeply disturbed by what he saw. He told people he called his own father to seek moral counsel. He worried that paying the driver off with Uber’s own shares was financially irresponsible—would Uber compensate all of its drivers who felt mistreated? To Ting, the incident reeked of a lack of self-control. In the email, he wrote that Kalanick “no longer had the moral standing” to lead Uber. After Uber’s lawyers insisted the company wouldn’t pay Kamel to clean up Kalanick’s personal scandal, Kalanick agreed to pay Kamel $200,000 out of his own pocket, according to a person familiar with the matter. “The meeting ended on a positive note, and Travis appreciated Mr. Kamel’s openness and forgiveness,” a spokesperson for Kalanick said in a statement.

lol good work kamel

Over the years, Kalanick had a simple method for dealing with Bill Gurley, one of his earliest backers and board members. Kalanick told colleagues that all he had to do was ignore Gurley’s phone calls and Gurley would call less often.

The silent treatment never seemed to bother Gurley much. A tall, affable Texan and a partner at venture capital firm Benchmark, he often appeared at conferences and on television evangelizing Uber and praising the entrepreneurial abilities of its CEO. In 2016, along with the rest of Uber’s board, he turned over more control to Kalanick as part of a $3.5 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.

As 2017 wore on, Kalanick became even less communicative than normal. He was regularly missing or canceling leadership team meetings and wasn’t delivering on his declaration, made in a public letter, to hire “a Chief Operating Officer: a peer who can partner with me to write the next chapter in our journey.” In March, after years of trying, Gurley finally got himself appointed to the board’s audit committee and learned of the steep losses in Uber’s subprime vehicle-leasing division, which helped its drivers finance cars.

Gurley’s cheerleading turned into anxiety and then horror. Benchmark’s stake in Uber was worth billions; could that fall by half? Could it fall to zero? Would they all end up in court? People at Benchmark worried that the Uber situation was affecting Gurley’s health.

Even in top-level conversations where Kalanick appeared to be absent, other executives and board members suspected that Huffington was serving as his proxy. The founder of the Huffington Post was a constant presence at Uber’s offices, making suggestions that seemed to promote her new wellness company, Thrive Global Holdings LLC. For example, she wanted to put “nap pods” at driver hubs and give drivers meditation wristbands. Huffington’s company received $50,000 in consulting fees from Uber. The perceived self-dealing didn’t go over well internally, and she had the money returned, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Huffington says that Thrive provided services at cost, and that Huffington refunded the fees when events required her to take on a more active role at Uber.

So that flamethrower that Elon Musk teased The Boring Company would start selling after it ran out of its 50,000 hats? Yeah, it’s real – and you can pre-order one now if you want need a ridiculous way to spend $500.

Musk revealed the flamethrower on Saturday, after some digging tipped its existence late last week. The Boring Company Flamethrower is functional, too, as you can see from this Instagram featuring some Boring Co. staff, presumably well safety trained, firing off two of the things IRL.

lol

toyotathon posted:

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

http://www.afr.com/business/transport/automobile/tesla-grants-breathtaking-33b-stock-option-award-to-elon-musk-20180123-h0n9so

had dinner w/ a college friend who'd just quit tesla after nearly a decade. my takeaway (not hers) was that it's an insane cult of personality. she said the way it works is, elon (first name basis) goes on the news and makes wild claims, and their job as engineers and designers is to make elon not look like a liar. can you picture that? and his wild claims usually involve timelines and scale, so, hell of a way to build novel factories meant to last 2 generations. the other internal ideological work-motive is that their mission is saving the planet, a mission other companies aren't bothering with, which even has the virtue of being half-true.

on this subreddit there's a handy compilation of many of his promises/predictions

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/73eh4m/tracking_elon_musks_visions_promises_and/

here's a list of what's gonna happen in 2018 according to musk:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/7spkqa/happy_2018_everybody_lets_take_a_moment_to_recall/

the stuff that's clearly fanciful, like sending people around the moon, annoys me less. there's also some complicity from media which breathlessly report on every silly throwaway comment he makes. you can see in the comments he uses a lot of weasel words etc.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 (Jan. 31, 2018 00:59:31)