Neal Freiman

So either you got to borrow more, cut costs, which they're trying to do,

or raise the first, or raise the cost of stamps.

And that's how you can somewhat be financially valuable.

Request granted.

Yeah, Uber suddenly finds itself at the center of the self-driving universe.

It is shocking for those of us who remember how much of a disaster their initial foray was.

Back in March 2018, an Uber self-driving test vehicle killed a pedestrian.

It was the first time that an autonomous vehicle had killed a pedestrian.

So their project was absolutely in shambles.

They were trying to make it in-house.

They killed that in 2020.

And now they are partnering with Toyota.

25 self-driving car developers, including Waymo, who is the other leader in this race.

It's just a remarkable turnaround and a repositioning by Khosrowshahi to figure out how Uber could fit into this self-driving paradigm.

It looks like he found an angle.

But Khosrowshahi thinks he can make Uber indispensable to the self-driving ecosystem by becoming that back-end B2B platform, that mission control that controls everything.

On a recent podcast on Semaphore, he said that autonomous cars need to be serviced, charged, repositioned, insured, financed, and washed.

He said these are very, very sophisticated machines that need lots of

tender loving care and he thinks uber with their massive uh fleet already we are in a great position to be that back-end service that autonomous vehicles these yes waymo's going by itself but at the end of the day who's going to charge these vehicles who's going to clean them who's going to maintenance them uber thinks that it can be that for self-driving all right we're going to take a quick break and come back with our dog the week right after this

That's broken ad targeting, throwing data at a wall, placing budget in the wrong place, and giving the wrong audience an existential crisis in the process.