Thread by @doctorow

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").

1/

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.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/19/lar…

2/

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.

pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…

3/

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).

pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…

4/

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.

5/

Measures like spending hundreds of millions of dollars on California's #Prop22, which legalized worker misclassification. Measures like rampant wage-theft from drivers. Measures like waging legal wars against whistleblowers.

pluralistic.net/2021/02/19/tex…

6/

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.

businessinsider.com/uber-tax-avoid…

7/

A report from the Australian NGO @CICTAR, reported in the Dutch press, describes Uber's tax evasion innovations as "the Champions League of tax avoidance."

groene.nl/artikel/een-go…

8/

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' worth of $1b annual tax credits.

9/

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.

10/

Its lax enforcement didn't just encourage Uber to create 50 shell companies - it also let the company get away with failing to file "mandatory" disclosures for many of these "businesses."

11/

All of this redounds around the world - in India, Uber pays only half of the mandatory 6% tax owed by multinationals (India could really use that cash about now).

12/

Image:
Vectors Point, PK (modified)
thenounproject.com/term/robber/32…

Ian Merchant (modified)
flickr.com/photos/iainmer…

CC BY:
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.…

eof/

ETA - If you'd like an unrolled version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

pluralistic.net/2021/05/13/ube…