After years of being blamed for the woes of taxi drivers in New York City, Uber is no longer the leading villain. Over the weekend, the New York Times published a scathing investigation of the city’s taxi medallion system and the bankers, dealers, lenders, and city officials who propped it up, helping to take millions of dollars off the hands of unsuspecting drivers at the peak of a bubble.
Amazon-owned Whole Foods Market will remove plastic straws from stores in the US, the UK, and Canada by July, the company said today. Whole Foods is also switching to smaller plastic bags in its produce department and replacing hard plastic casing on rotisserie chickens with bags that use roughly 70% less plastic. The company estimates that these changes will add up to using about 800,000 fewer pounds of plastic per year.
Earlier this week, the US National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) released an April 16 memo that says Uber drivers are independent contractors, not employees, under US labor law. The decision, hardly surprising under a Trump-appointed NLRB, makes it even less likely that Uber drivers in the US will ever see certain protections afforded to traditional employees, such a guaranteed minimum wage and the right to form a union, recognized at the national level. But the future for Uber drivers won’t be decided by the US federal government.
“Obviously our stock did not trade as well as we had hoped post-IPO,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote in a note to staff yesterday. After falling 7.6% from its $45 IPO price on its first day of trading, Uber tumbled another 11% yesterday, closing at $37.10.
We’ve known practically since Uber started dispatching rides that one day it would make a lot of people very rich. But it’s also possible that the company could turn out to be a bad bet for some of its biggest investors.
Uber has always been disruptive, to steal a phrase from Silicon Valley, so it’s fitting that the days ahead of its much-anticipated IPO have been disrupted by a global driver strike.
Lyft Inc. is no longer a startup, but it still loses money like the best of them.
As Uber races toward an initial public offering that could value it at $90 billion, the company should hope would-be investors aren’t paying much attention to New York City, one of its most important markets.
Uber redefined how we think about transportation. The original Uber concept—a private ride, summoned by tapping an app on your smartphone—was so simple and universally appealing that it upended the traditional cab industry practically overnight.
The world moves fast, but Amazon moves even faster. The company wants to make one-day shipping the new standard for members of its signature Prime program, executives said on a call this afternoon, and plans to put $800 million behind the effort in the upcoming quarter.
Tesla lost nearly $700 million in the quarter ended March 31, one of its worst quarters on record.
The latest $1 billion deal consists of $667 million from Toyota and Denso, and $333 million from Softbank, the companies said in their press release.
The Zooms are zooming.
When Uber goes public, every share will have one vote.
Amazon is everyone’s favorite example of a company that lost money to make money. But Amazon has nothing on Uber.
Tesla could do with some acceleration.
You could be forgiven for thinking startups had stopped going public.
It’s raining tech IPOs.
New York City will be the first city in the US to charge motorists extra to enter the busiest areas, after the state agreed to a congestion pricing plan as part of its fiscal year 2020 budget hours before the April 1 deadline.
Tesla’s fabled mass-market electric car has yet to materialize.
Lyft might not be making any money, but its investors and executives certainly are.
Lyft began trading on the Nasdaq today (March 29), kicking off what promises to be a big year for money-losing consumer tech startups.
On March 22, an extra $1,000 appeared in Lyft driver Jay Cradeur’s bank account. It was a one-time cash bonus from the ride-hailing company, awarded to any driver in good standing with at least 10,000 completed rides on Lyft as of Feb. 25. Cradeur had nearly 15,000.
Uber is buying Middle East rival Careem for $3.1 billion, with a combination of cash and debt. The company is paying $1.4 billion in cash and $1.7 billion in notes that convert at $55 a share (paywall), 12% higher than the $49-a-share investors paid in Uber’s September 2018 financing.
