Play the Sad Trombone Music

Uber and Lyft approved alleged war criminal to drive

He’s accused of war crimes and torture, but he drove for more than 18 months, raising questions about the thoroughness of the background check process https://t.co/XDEa9eAvoI pic.twitter.com/y7zY17hAaq

— CNN (@CNN) May 14, 2019

Also, Yes

It looks like Uber’s IPO is turning into a complete cluster-f%$#:

Few things prove the ancient warning “Be careful what you wish for” like a Wall Street sure thing that blows itself to smithereens.

For example, the Uber initial public offering.

Investment and tech gurus spent five years hawking Uber as a world-changing business and Uber stock as a stairway to fortune. Contrary voices were heard in the marketplace, it is true, but they were few and far between and in any event drowned out by the drum-beating from the other side.

But now the public market — the defining arbiter of the value of an enterprise, at least as a snapshot — has spoken, and its judgment is harsh.

On Tuesday, Uber closed at $39.96 after trading as low as $36.85, well below its close Friday, its first post-IPO trading day. This is a very eloquent price: It speaks volumes about the judgment of venture investors, about the credibility of private-market valuations of companies, and about Wall Street underwriting.

Remember that Uber was viewed as the ultimate “unicorn,” a term for venture-funded companies with private valuations higher than $1 billion. Onlookers gathered, like gawkers at a shop window, to watch how this unicorn would be transformed into a bellwether in the public markets.

………

Let’s examine Uber’s numbers. At $39.96, Uber is calculated to have a total market value of about $67 billion. That sounds like a lot for a company that has never made money and in fact lost more than $800 million in its last reported quarter, the fourth quarter of 2018.

But the market valuation is a sharp reduction from Uber’s putative value during its private-market era, which ended Friday. In that era, the company’s backers were talking about a valuation as high as $120 billion. That was the peak, but starting about five years ago the company’s putative value never fell below $68 billion.

The company has no path to profitability, there are very little in the way of barriers to entry, and every "disruptive innovation" that were used to justify its high private valuation was either abusive or outright illegal.

If it crashes and burns, it will be a well deserved end to a pox on transportation.