SF
Stifel Financial Corp.
stock NYSE

We gonna gap down so fuckin hard. Jensen will be running all over SF screaming “Buy! Buy! Buy!”

The marketplace thesis is solid until it isn't. Uber's advantage is demand and logistics - matching supply to riders, handling payments, routing. That's real and hard to replicate. But the commenter who said Waymo already proves Uber has no moat isn't wrong either. If Waymo can operate profitably in SF without Uber's network, the question becomes whether scale matters more than ownership. The numbers you cited - $58B gross bookings, 18% trip growth, $10B TTM free cash flow - show a healthy business today.

We aren’t in a position to buy in the near future because my wife’s career moves her between major metros every few years at the moment. Pretty soon we’ll settle somewhere for longer, but then we may be in a metro where owning property is not an option for people like us, such as SF or NYC. We invest in a taxable brokerage alongside our tax advantaged accounts.

Because Tesla probably would rather focus their resources on scaling the network in the largest regions/metropolitain areas/and cities.
Small-medium sized towns will naturally have a lower IRR, and building this network demands infrastructure (warehouses with private charging stations, repair/maintenace/cleaning facilities and local employees, which means hiring local managers to hire local employees; and Tesla probably thinks all the work necessary to manage a small fleet of 10-100 Cybercabs is not worth their effort.
So why not outsource it to a co-dependant owner/operator?
For a small entrepreneur managing 10 cybercabs will probably be a good worthwhile business. You just need a small parking lot/warehouse, a charger or two, and one person to plug the cars in and clean them if necessary. Then that person can scale up as necessary, hire a few employees as the fleet gets bigger, etc.
But for Tesla, micromanaging a tiny fleet like this just isn't worth it, or rather it's not going to be as lucrative as growing a 1,000+ car fleet in a big city/town like Pheonix/Austin/LA/SF/etc.

We gonna gap down so fuckin hard. Jensen will be running all over SF screaming “Buy! Buy! Buy!”

The marketplace thesis is solid until it isn't. Uber's advantage is demand and logistics - matching supply to riders, handling payments, routing. That's real and hard to replicate. But the commenter who said Waymo already proves Uber has no moat isn't wrong either. If Waymo can operate profitably in SF without Uber's network, the question becomes whether scale matters more than ownership. The numbers you cited - $58B gross bookings, 18% trip growth, $10B TTM free cash flow - show a healthy business today.

We aren’t in a position to buy in the near future because my wife’s career moves her between major metros every few years at the moment. Pretty soon we’ll settle somewhere for longer, but then we may be in a metro where owning property is not an option for people like us, such as SF or NYC. We invest in a taxable brokerage alongside our tax advantaged accounts.

Because Tesla probably would rather focus their resources on scaling the network in the largest regions/metropolitain areas/and cities.
Small-medium sized towns will naturally have a lower IRR, and building this network demands infrastructure (warehouses with private charging stations, repair/maintenace/cleaning facilities and local employees, which means hiring local managers to hire local employees; and Tesla probably thinks all the work necessary to manage a small fleet of 10-100 Cybercabs is not worth their effort.
So why not outsource it to a co-dependant owner/operator?
For a small entrepreneur managing 10 cybercabs will probably be a good worthwhile business. You just need a small parking lot/warehouse, a charger or two, and one person to plug the cars in and clean them if necessary. Then that person can scale up as necessary, hire a few employees as the fleet gets bigger, etc.
But for Tesla, micromanaging a tiny fleet like this just isn't worth it, or rather it's not going to be as lucrative as growing a 1,000+ car fleet in a big city/town like Pheonix/Austin/LA/SF/etc.