The second note: "Don't be an insecure little jerk".
The third note: Remember the ironic warning that may go as far back as Lactantius (but definitely La Ménagerie, 1868):
Cet animal est tres méchant;
Quand on l'attaque il se défend.
And what, wary yet intrigued reader may be asking, what the hell am I talking about?
First some background.
Back on December 1, 2016 Ms K. wrote a post, "The taxi unicorn’s new clothes" that began:
Finally! Word is getting out. It’s not just Uber’s “innovation” claims which are questionable, it’s potentially the entire business model.This apparently angered Bloomberg's Eric Newcomer who started a long back-and-forth on Twitter.
Kudos to Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith for giving transportation industry expert Hubert Horan a platform to highlight the following analysis of the scant figures Uber has shared (reluctantly) with the public thus far – none of which had a requirement to be audited in accordance with GAAP or SEC reporting standards....
I don't reproduce it here because a) It is 14 tweets and b) for some reason his (linked above) thread omits the key tweet. Here it is via Izabella's thread:
That's just being a dink.@izakaminska @yvessmith https://t.co/IYmBp0snBB How can you give this so much lift and not communicate errors?— Eric Newcomer (@EricNewcomer) December 2, 2016
A few weeks later (Dec. 21) Kaminska authored a post we linked to in "A Serious Look At Some Potentially Large Risk Factors In Uber's Finances (with a small bit of jocularity)":
...A few weeks ago public transport expert Hubert Hogan, wrote an impressive four-part series on Naked Capitalism questioning the Uber model both on profitability grounds and public transport logic grounds. The conclusions were stark. Uber’s primary objective seems to be achieving monopoly at any cost (mostly by way of undercutting) and holding on to that position irrespective of whether it is actually making transport more efficient or not.Heated exchange huh?
In the wake of those posts, Bloomberg’s Eric Newcomer (who had broken the original bottom line figures which Hogan had based his story on) entered into a heated exchange on Twitter with me regarding whether or not Hubert had correctly assumed Uber had failed to consolidate the full extent of its Chinese losses into those figures. Newcomer argued it had and that Hubert was thus exaggerating the scale of the investor subsidy propping up Uber’s global operations. Hubert on the other hand insisted — based on his experience working with Chinese transport JVs or partnerships — that it was unlikely Uber could have owned a majority stake in its Chinese business, and thus would not have been obliged to consolidate all the numbers into its bottom line. Without actually being able to see the accounts directly, or get a better understanding of the corporate ownership structure, it was difficult to verify either way.
Since then, however, Eric Newcomer has reported a fresh set of Uber numbers based on reporting by the Information noting:...
He was a rude little boy and apparently wrong in his whole "I know more about Uber's numbers than you" schtick in the tweetstream.
Here's the denouement, Izabella's April 15th post "Snap AV: About that $2.8bn loss for Uber in 2016….":
Those who have followed Hubert Horan’s excellent series on the non-viability of Uber’s business model at Naked Capitalism may be aware of questions posed over whether his analysis understood the exceptionality of the $1.2bn loss figure he cited for the first half of 2016 on grounds it included costs associated with Uber’s unfortunate foray into China. A one off.
Horan’s analysis — drawing on extensive experience in international transportation — had assumed the China losses were not consolidated because of the way generally accepted accounting principles work.
If Horan’s presumptions were wrong, however, it could may have exaggerated the cash burn associated with the core business model.
Got that? The huge, never-before-seen-in-a-VC-funded-company-losses continued irrespective of the whole China question and Ms Kaminska uses Newcomer's own reporting to stick the knife in.Late Friday, however, Uber released its full year results for 2016 to selected press. This showed a total $2.8bn loss for the year. Critically, as Bloomberg’s Eric Newcomer notes:
Net revenue was $6.5 billion, while adjusted net losses were $2.8 billion, excluding the China business, which it sold last summer....
The quote at the top depends on the translation of méchant for the degree of animosity implied. I'm going with naughty but it can also translate as bad or wicked:
This animal is very naughty
When one attacks it, it defends itself
And in other Uber news, via Clickhole:
