There isn’t a single business model out there that can survive a 90+% reduction in customers. That categorization is absurd. It would be like saying if Google can’t survive a sudden reduction of 90% of people using the internet it should fail.
You can say what you want about bailouts but saying a “business model is bad” because of a once in a lifetime disaster is ridiculous.
Plenty of businesses keep many months of runway in cash for emergencies. Airlines spent 96% of their free cash flow, over the span of a decade, buying back their shares.
Since you mentioned Google, they have over $100 billion in cash and could easily survive an interruption of this magnitude. Google could go to $0 in revenue and survive for many years. Having cash for an emergency is what a well managed and responsible business should do.
Airlines don’t have any money because they were poorly run and greedy. Let poorly run and greedy businesses fail.
This. While the amount of runway can be debated, the sheer number of American powerhouse businesses that saw a single month of dipped revenue and started screaming for possible bankruptcy showed A LOT.
The way we do business today is casually over leveraged and sold as normal.
We are not building stable, 100-yr organizations that support people and their livelihoods. We’re building huge ATM machines that siphon massive amounts of future opportunity from a 1000 people and exchanges it for massive short term gain for 1-100 people.
You can say what you want about bailouts but saying a “business model is bad” because of a once in a lifetime disaster is ridiculous.