Bitter DoorDash Driver Reacts to Facebook (Meta) Naming DoorDash Ceo Tony Xu as a Director

My $0.02

Reported by Bloomberg on Jan. 11, Meta named DoorDash CEO Tony Xu as a director on their board of ten members advising Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO. It’s implied Zuckerberg bought Tony on to give advice on commerce in the metaverse.

“I’ve always thought it’s important to have great tech leaders on our board, and Tony has direct experience both running a tech company and solving complex challenges in commerce…” said Zuckerberg.

As someone that’s sold multiple covered calls on DoorDash and worked as a DoorDash driver part-time for the last 1.5 years, I despise Tony Xu. Out of all the delivery apps, GrubHub, UberEats, Postmates, DoorDash treats their drivers the worst. Manipulation, decpetion, lies, they’ve gone through greater lengths than any other app to (try to) make a profit at the expense of their drivers. Not only do they hide the tip amounts on all orders from drivers in an attempt to trick them into accepting minimal-to-zero tip orders, they recently implemented a pay structure designed to profit even more at their drivers’ expense.

TL;DR: They lowered driver base pay from $3 to $2.50 for short distance/profitable orders for drivers, and “raised” the base pay from $3 to $4.50 for long distance/non-profitable orders. But it’s at least framed nicely to make the drivers feel like Doordash is doing them a favor. Instead of saying “We’re paying you less money on the orders that are actually profitable for you, and marginally more on unprofitable orders that will still cost you money to accept,” Tony said:

“You may now earn 10-30% more in base pay on long distance deliveries” and “For shorter distance dashes that are quicker to complete, you may now see a DoorDash base pay offer of $2.50 for single-order trips.”

As an investor, you probably think DoorDash is killing it as a business the way they fleece their drivers—especially during a pandemic with delivery demand at an all time high—but they’re actually losing money and have still never turned a profit. It probably has something to do with the food delivery industry being hyper-competitive and drivers can easily choose to deliver for other apps…probably.

DoorDash IPO’d at $182 in 2020 and made Tony a billionaire, however, so good for Tony and the DASH insiders.

With all that said, I think adding Tony to its board was a good decision by Facebook (Meta). Tony’s shown he can get creative with ways to try to turn a profit (scroll up) in an industry that’s margins are razor thin, and was able to grow DoorDash into the market share leader of the food delivery industry that it is today. He’s clearly a smart guy that will bring a lot of innovative ideas to Meta, and Tony’s lack of morals should help them on the business end (seriously).