Has Bird ever been profitable? Even excluding the cost of buying the scooters (e.g. only considering op. ex.)?

Reading between the lines, "startups" (they are companies and thus eligible anyway based on standard conditions) refers to companies relying completely on external funding in the pursuit of positive cash flow and profitability further down the line. Looks a lot like a covered bailout for VCs and other investors. Because if a company was profitable before Corona, meaning banks would have provided credit already, the government is making it a lot easier and cheaper to get additional credit lines.

So people who are still employed, but can't (or shouldn't) leave their homes still have some money, probably more than usual.

But the primary answer to that question is the same as it's been for the past couple decades: the people with the money are, well, the people hoarding all the money. The owners, the (big) employers, the people at the top.

As has been reported various places, just as an example, the airline industry spent the last decade spending something like 80-90% of every dollar they made buying back stock to enrich their executives. That's why they don't have anything saved for a crisis like this, and that's who has all the money now.

Not to minimize the impact on companies and people who are seeing drastically reduced demand, but it's a serious overstatement to say that all companies and people are.

Banks manage money but that’s not the same as having that money on their own balance sheet. Banks can and do go bankrupt.

There is no world where an airline/hotel or any business could have possibly saved enough cash to fight a 90%+ drop in revenue for months and still remain competitive in the market.

The point is, it’s hard to predict the future. Who knows if the future will bring a fatal bug in your software, a pandemic, or both. But regardless, we all know tough times will always happen, and to therefore be prepared.

For example, a hotel owner can choose to squirrel away cash to protect the hotel and its employees for months of no income. A competing hotel will instead choose to renovate the hotel. Which hotel will customers choose to stay at?

The job of management is to find a profitable way to deploy capital. If management are returning capital to shareholders, outside of expected dividends of course, it’s because they are bereft of ideas. What would I have done? Invested a large portion of that money in long term R&D and careful strategic acquisitions. It’s the same over at IBM. The current generation of managers have inherited cash flows set up by their predecessors but have no idea what to do with them.

The businesses in years past made money, invested some of it, spent some on R&D, and distributed some to shareholders (via buybacks). What other option was there?

The new meta is "if we all do the same stupid shit we'll get bailed out when the crunch comes"

The penalty for a bailout should be bankruptcy and nationalization. Taxpayers should profit, not lose.

Well, they’re being demonised because they’re pushing heavily for a government bailout that will avoid them going bankrupt.

Because some people may not realize/forget the source of these billions, these billions are either taxpayer money, OR these are new/fresh money (which means diluting the value of the currency for everyone).

Do note that the buybacks last time were enabled by government loans. So that is a bit suspect on the governments part for not leveraging the power they did have.

But yes overall these silly critiques of strawmen I think just diffuse anger that should be directed at real things. No good.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-03-17/the-go...

The only solution in my eyes for this dilemma is, that the government should do bail outs, but at the price of shares. For any money paid, which isn't just credits, the government should get company shares, which are sold off, as soon as the market stabilizes.

So let them all hang.

What dollar figure should be put on the potential demise of the company versus "saving earns you next to nothing"?

but that's not even the craziest thing in your comment. it's that you are probably a salaried worker making excuses for the boss. it's a crazy crazy world.