ANGRY BIRD: the e-scooter firm is chasing riders for pennies in a desperate effort to claw back some of that $31 million in unpaid balances that it erroneously booked as revenue over 2.5 years 🙃🧵

oversharing.substack.com/p/angry-bird (Yes I have been hanging onto this pun for some time)

E-scooter company Bird trading at $0.24 a share after telling investors on Monday that its financial statements of the past 2.5 years "should no longer be relied upon" and there is "substantial doubt about the Company's ability to continue as a going concern"

🔥🧵 The short version: Bird lets riders pay with preloaded wallet balances ("Bird cash"), much like a gift card or metro card. Sometimes people took rides but didn't have enough Bird cash to pay. Bird recorded the full price of the ride as revenue anyway!

Can Uber be profitable? 🧵

1. It's crazy that this is still a question! Uber is 13 years old. It does biz in 72 countries and 10,500+ cities. Last year it had 118mn monthly active users and did 6.3bn rides/deliveries 2. Uber has always said it would reach profitability at scale, thanks to network effects, etc.

But Uber is the definition of scale and consistent/reliable profits are still nowhere in sight.