Month: May 2022

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Following a series of “super clarifying” meetings with shareholders, Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, emailed employees on Sunday night with an arresting message: “we need to show them the money.”

Mangling his metaphors, Khosrowshahi explained that the market was experiencing a “seismic shift” and the “goalposts have changed.” The ride-hailing and food delivery company’s priority must now be to generate free cash flow. “We are serving multitrillion-dollar markets, but market size is irrelevant if it doesn’t translate into profit,” he wrote.

For the boss of Uber to be trumpeting cash flow and profit would once have seemed about as likely as Elon Musk shouting about the benefits of personal humility and petrol-fueled cars. No company has been more emblematic of the long, crazy, capital-doped bull market in technology stocks than Uber. Founded in 2009, the company floated a decade later at a valuation of $76 billion without recording a single quarter of profits. Its belated conversion to financial orthodoxy shows how much markets have been transformed since the turn in the interest rate cycle and the crash of the tech-heavy Nasdaq market, which has dropped 26 percent this year.

Enlarge / Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks during the Moscow Urban Forum 2018 on July 18, 2018 in Moscow, Russia. (credit: Getty Images | Mikhail Svetlov )

Not long after Russia steamrolled into South Ossetia in 2008, effectively annexing the territory of its southern neighbor, a group of Georgians banded together to set up a new Russian-language television station, a voice independent of the Kremlin: Kanal PIK.

With the help of Georgia’s public broadcaster, they signed a five-year deal with French satellite operator Eutelsat to beam their station into the Caucasus. Just two weeks after they launched in 2010, Eutelsat notified PIK that they were dropped. Their space on the satellite had been promised to Gazprom Media Group, a chief pillar in Moscow’s tightly controlled media system.

Kanal PIK said in a statement at the time that the saga “leaves Intersputnik and Gazprom Media Group—both of which adhere to the Kremlin’s editorial line—with a de facto satellite transmission monopoly over Russian-language audience.” Kanal PIK would acquire a spot on another Eutelsat a year later, but the station struggled and went dark in 2012.