
Can Uber ever make money? - prostoalex
https://www.economist.com/business/2019/04/27/can-uber-ever-make-money
======
skywhopper
There is literally no way for a mass-market taxi service to make money unless
they have a monopoly, or some unexpected disruptive technology comes along
that gives one company an unassailable advantage in lowering costs.

The Uber app was the original innovation, but it's not particularly innovative
anymore. Besides Lyft, traditional taxi companies have similar apps in some
markets.

Skirting regulation and good labor practices were also supposed to help, but
that can't last once you become competitive with the establishment.

Self-driving cars were supposed to lower labor costs, but that's not going to
be a thing for decades if it ever works. But even if it does, it won't be an
exclusive technology. They won't be able to make any more profit from it. If
their costs go down, so will everyone else's and they won't be able to
undercut the competition without continuing to lose money.

~~~
parksy
But in a way, that's the beauty of disruptive use of technology. Without the
innovation of the Uber app, the traditional taxi cartels would have no
incentive to improve their services and the fact that they have been forced to
do so in order to compete benefits the consumer. They're not quite there yet,
and are still catching up. The next logical step is a lift aggregation service
that creates a marketplace.

I want a lift from x to y to z. Bid on me.

~~~
Skunkleton
As it stands the price you pay for a ride in an uber is unfairly low. Driving
it even lower would be irresponsible.

~~~
rubicon33
Call me a snob, but Uber's criteria for what qualifies as an acceptable car
has dramatically declined to the point where even Taxis are sometimes "nicer".
Combine that with the fact that the drivers often don't know the neighborhood
and rely exclusively on GPS (so tend to be worse drivers than a taxi).

I'm left feeling like the fare - strictly from the perspective of a consumer -
is actually too high.

~~~
GordonS
> Combine that with the fact that the drivers often don't know the
> neighborhood

I used to travel to Houston quite a lot. Not sure if this is representative of
taxis in general in the US, but the taxi drivers _never_ knew the
neighbourhood. I couldn't say "I want to go to Acme Stuff in X district", I
had to give a "Cross road" (a very US thing, that) and the driver would use
satnav based on that. It did seem that a lot of taxi drivers were recent
immigrants (invariably chatty), so that accounts for some, but not all.

At first, this was a surprise, as in my native UK I can literally give a
street name within 50 miles of where I am, and the driver cocks their head for
a second, gears whir, and yes! They know it!

~~~
astrodust
That's probably because becoming a taxi driver in places like London is
extremely hard
([https://www.theknowledgetaxi.co.uk](https://www.theknowledgetaxi.co.uk)),
while becoming a taxi driver in Houston is probably as simple as "do you have
a license?"

~~~
wrboyce
Yes, London is the whole UK.

EDIT: If it sets a standard then why has that standard not been adopted
nationwide? Your argument is dead in the water and I can only assume you’re
speaking as a person who has never visited the UK.

~~~
astrodust
It sets a standard.

The US has no such equivalent.

------
govg
I can only see them making money in three ways :

\- They scale up massively and capture a huge fraction of the ride sharing
market, thus allowing them to offer low cost / low margin rides, but making up
for it by volumes : At least in India, they are in a good position, but they
seem to have conceded the other markets with high potential for growth like SE
Asia and China.

\- They have a premium offering that is actually quite a trend-setter : Revive
the Uber Black service and take it up a notch, target richer clientele which
will be willing to pay a premium to ride in a much better car and with trained
chauffeurs.

\- They push heavily in the pooling space - this allows them to use their
vehicular inventory better as well as drive up margins per ride : This doesn't
seem to be a huge focus for them as of now, but it could change.

The other big change that could transform their fortunes is if they put out a
viable self driving product. I do not think it'll be economically profitable,
or even technologically viable in the near term.

~~~
dcolkitt
Option 4: Uber uses the expertise, infrastructure, and brand it built in
ridesharing to expand into the becoming the de facto standard for timely last
mile delivery. This is why UberEats is such a major strategic focus for the
company. It's proof of concept that they can do more than be a taxi.

An efficient platform for quickly and cheaply ferrying around stuff around
town is a _way_ bigger market than ridesharing. We're not only talking about
the obvious examples like residential packages, groceries, and laundry.

But entirely new business models that didn't previously exist, because there's
no efficient last-mile delivery solution. Cloud kitchen are an example of a
nascent industry that could only emerge in a post-Uber world.

~~~
bluGill
Courier services have existed for years for last mile.

I have a friend who was (20 years ago) paid full time by one law office to get
papers to/from the court room (he worked for a company that dedicated him to
that job). Part of his job was knowing the proper way to walk into a trial in
progress.

My dad more than once hired a taxi to take a package to the airport. I suspect
post 9-11 this isn't legally allowed, but back then if you needed to get a bug
fix to a customer your fastest option was put it on a tape, put the tape in a
suitcase, buy a plane ticket for "Mr Package", and then check the suitcase in
the name of Mr Package.

~~~
duxup
>My dad more than once hired a taxi to take a package to the airport. I
suspect post 9-11 this isn't legally allowed, but back then if you needed to
get a bug fix to a customer your fastest option was put it on a tape, put the
tape in a suitcase, buy a plane ticket for "Mr Package", and then check the
suitcase in the name of Mr Package

I worked for a company where we would hire a courier to fly with the package
when needed.

We sent a few tapes that way, but also some important equipment when it was
critical to a customer.

It was by far the fastest and best way to be sure a dude would be at the
office door in X minutes, on the plane in Y, and at the customer site in Z
with the needed thing(s).

It was expensive, but they were really reliable and professional.

------
rchaud
Looking at Uber, WeWork, JustEat etc., I get the feeling there's a growing gap
between what we were brought up to believe about entrepreneurship and
innovation vs. what the reality is.

We're all familiar with the '>50% of small businesses fail' stat (not the real
number) and that we should be toiling and not taking a salary for years until
we break even, i.e. reach a point where we're no longer losing money on every
project/sale. If you aren't able to achieve this, your pricing, product-market
fit, etc. have failed, because the all-knowing, all-equilibrium-izing market
has spoken.

Every politician out there shows reverence for the 'small businessperson'
taking risks and bringing jobs and tax revenue into their communities. But
once in office, the people they meet with are Travis Kalachian and others,
people who cannot make a profit, but are excellent at convincing rich
investors that they should make Travis a millionaire.

The reality is that a VC-backed company can simply outprice any competitor,
and if it's not enough, can lobby city hall to change the laws to favour them.
And this cash spigot can stay on for years, as long as you can show you're
gaining customers every quarter. If you're a big enough play, you can move
your whole HQ to a low-tax friendly country and administer local operations
from there.

The jobs that are created by this are right around minimum-wage level, so how
is this supposed to create wealth for anybody except the shareholders who got
in early with cheap valuations?

~~~
JimboOmega
The question (with Uber in particular) is that if this business model really
covers up a huge ponzi scheme.

Before the last decade (or even 5 years?) the amount of money some of these
companies have been raising would have been unheard of and required an IPO.

But if you can keep finding ever bigger investors to give you ever more
money...

It's a really weird reality, because typically the worst kind of place to
start a company is one with huge barriers to entry that requires a ton of
money to get started. Yet that seems to have done quite well recently.

Squashing minimum wage service providers seems to be merely a side effect...
these companies can't really make money EVEN WHEN they ignore regulations and
exploit their not-technically-employees.

~~~
jv22222
> with huge barriers to entry that requires a ton of money to get started

Just a note that the proof of concept stage was very cheaply done. Travis
hired someone to make an app and the "dispatch" system was just a single php
page. He then tested it out with his friends.

That said, I agree that ultimately to get to the position they are today
required a ton of cash - just the getting started was pretty cheap.

Actually we have the blow-by-blow of how it all played out on our podcast
since Jason was employee #7 and built out the original node dispatch system.

[http://techzinglive.com](http://techzinglive.com)

I'm not sure exactly what show he started working on it, might need to go back
to 95. Full show list here:

[https://www.dropbox.com/sh/frnqzndys9j3vc1/P7jHgH0BQK](https://www.dropbox.com/sh/frnqzndys9j3vc1/P7jHgH0BQK)

~~~
hammock
Hustle recognize hustle but which podcast episode is it dude? There are 300+
eps at that link.

~~~
jv22222
Well it's A LOT of them.

Because we spoke about the Uber stuff as Jason lived it in real time ;)

A fun one was when Jason turned down the CTO position and of course we had no
idea at the time what that really meant.

I guess in the latest episode 321 (Quick & Dirty) Jason does give an overview
of the Uber story and how he got involved if you want a TL;DR version.

------
TruthSHIFT
Keep in mind that this may not change when driverless cars become widely
available. Maintaining a fleet thousands of driverless cars may prove to be
more expensive than crowdsourcing a vehicle fleet.

~~~
dcolkitt
There's either two possibilities for the self-driving future.

1) Hardly anybody owns cars anymore. When we want to get from point A to point
B, we just call a driverless car from the network. But this type of service is
a natural monopoly.

When people are ridesharing everywhere, the network with the biggest fleet,
becomes the stochastically fastest and cheapest option. Plus add in the fact
that they're collecting a lot more data to constantly improve algorithm. This
is a winner-take-all market with fat monopoly margins for whoever wins. If
Uber prevails, it's likely that their profits will be larger than the entire
global auto market.

2) People still mostly own their own cars. They're driverless, but people like
the convenience, customization and sense of personal ownership with having
their own vehicle. Ridesharing is still an out-of-the-ordinary option for
unconventional lifestyles or special occasions.

But in this world, Uber doesn't need to own their own fleet. The same
crowdsourcing logic still works. Personal vehicle ownership means a huge
number of idle vehicles sitting in people's driveways. Without the pain-in-
the-ass factor of actually having to be the driver, expect a lot _more_ people
to put their car on Uber's network.

~~~
schnable
Not following how this is a natural monopoly. There aren't barriers to
multiple companies operating large fleets.

~~~
bluGill
In fact the market is likely large enough that multiple large companies will.

------
tjpaudio
I'm not quite sure everyone discussing this, including the economist article
author, is in the loop with why Lyft and Uber are getting valued the way they
are. Wall Street is not paying for a taxi company, they are betting that Uber
and Lyft are the best poised to first rollout driverless ride sharing, i.e.
one of them will own and monopolize patentable tech that the mass public wants
to use. The existing experience is a commodity business where profits go to
zero, that's well known and old news.

~~~
perfmode
Driverless ride sharing isn’t coming, in a meaningful way*, in the next ten
years, I’m willing to bet my house on that.

Meaningful such that it actually delivers monetarily

~~~
rand0mthought
Do you plan to short UBER on amount of your house cost?

~~~
idlewords
That would be a bet on both rational markets and lack of driverless
technology. That's a very different bet.

------
WheelsAtLarge
No, in its current state, they can't be profitable. Other transportation
options will become more desirable if Uber had to truly charge what it costs
to transport a customer so for now and the near future they have to subsidize
the rides which kills the possibility of profit.

Autonomous cars will help but that won't happen for years, 5-10 maybe more.
Additionally, if autonomy becomes a reality for Uber it will happen for other
modes of transportation too so they will have to compete there too. That will
be even harder since it's easier to get a bunch of cars working once the tech
is available.

Also Uber will not survive as it stands now. Regulations and public pressure
will eventually force it to conform to something similar to a very large cab
company.

Every industry eventually gets hit by consolidation. A business of individual
drivers can be even more profitable if it joins drivers into groups. They
become more reliable, they cost less to maintain and they gain power that they
can leverage against large industry actors. Maybe then, it will become
profitable. But that won't happen until the industry matures.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
I wonder if self-driving cars will be like Fusion, but instead of always being
20-40 years away, it's always 5-10 years away.

I do really feel like Waymo will prove successful in specific environments
THIS year and increment slowly, and eventually our transportation habits will
change to better utilize a cheaper, safer form of transportation.

But I wouldn't be surprised if I'm still saying that ten years from now.

------
bariswheel
The mouse changed the way we work, and it got commoditized. Just because a
company was first to adopt and make a business out of a disruptive technology
doesn't mean it's going to corner the market with it. In fact, history shows
that it's not the best approach to be the first adopter of a technology
(Kodak, Altavista, etc..)

------
viach
My observation - Uber is starting to have hard times competing on local
market. The quality of local competitors - their apps, fleet and service
overall is growing and Uber seems trying to reduce costs in this situation,
which probably won't help in a way, so to speak.

------
dvh
It seems like it it's the same with shared bikes. The only one making money
are bikes manufacturer.

------
uptown
Outline Link: [https://outline.com/endjbs](https://outline.com/endjbs)

~~~
dymk

        If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:
    
        1) you own the rights to,
        2) is in the public domain,
        3) constitutes fair use, or
        4) you have consent of the copyright holder.

------
jtlienwis
Re Competition Taxis or Uber are not always the cheapest way. One of my
friends used to do a lot of travelling to Tokyo on work assignments. The
others from the company always hailed a cab and ended up paying $100 for a
trip from the airport to the downtown hotels. My friend would jump onto the
Tokyo subway and was always there at the hotel to greet the rest of them when
their cabs would arrive. He usually paid just a few bucks for the subway
token. Myself, I would sometimes get rides in the day from people I just met
on the plane. But then it was a more trusting time. But maybe there is an app
there that pairs people arriving in the same town. Those that have their cars
in the airport parking lot and are willing to share a ride and those that are
willing to pay a few bucks.

------
m_ke
With all of the ride sharing companies burning money it seems like the real
bet here is being the last one standing. If Lyft folds, Uber will have much
more leverage to play with the margins.

~~~
swarnie_
This is basically it.

I have a choice between 4 services in my city. I pick the cheapest one
whenever i want to go somewhere (Thanks VC cash burn)

Last man standing gets the monopoly.

------
tw1010
Theoretically, couldn't they just fire almost all non-maintenance engineers
and continue running the app without building new features? Wouldn't that make
them profitable instantly?

~~~
ghaff
Stopping expanding would probably have a bigger impact. Are they really doing
a lot of new features/incremental infrastructure development at this point?
(Though I don't know how much they're still blowing on self-driving.)

------
olejorgenb
This might be ignorant, but I've wondered about this for a while.

Isn't Uber essentially a software company? The drivers doesn't get anything
besides their share of the fares?

According to the free part of the article they've lost 7.9 billion dollars
since 2009.

How expensive can it possible be to develop and operate their software?
According to some sources uber takes a cut from 20-25% (although some claim
much higher fractions in practice)

[http://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-
statistics/#6](http://www.businessofapps.com/data/uber-statistics/#6) claims
~10B _quarterly_ revenue for 2018, with net loss at close to 1B. (EDIT: seem
the revenue is counted as full fare price - not ubers cut, so that brings
"actual" revenue to ~2B/Q)

How are they not making money..? Lots of normal taxi services have booking
apps too. If they IPO it'll be interesting to see a more detailed breakdown of
their costs.

EDIT2: found the IPO prospectus including some numbers:
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm#toc647752_9)

------
habosa
I want to talk to someone who has invested in Lyft (or plans to do so for
Uber) through the public markets and is in it for a long-term buy and hold.
Like someone who really thinks the share price represents the net present
value of all future cash streams for Lyft/Uber.

I think I'd have a hard time finding someone like this. You don't have to
believe the company will make money, you just have to believe you can sell
your piece of the company to the next guy for more.

~~~
basementcat
> You don't have to believe the company will make money, you just have to
> believe you can sell your piece of the company to the next guy for more.

This is why people invest in gold and dogecoins.

------
carapace
I always try to bring this up in re: Uber/Lyft et. al.:

[https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-
the...](https://www.ianwelsh.net/the-market-fairy-will-not-solve-the-problems-
of-uber-and-lyft/)?

> Here is the thing about Uber and Lyft (and much of the “sharing economy”).

> They don’t pay the cost of their capital.

> The wages they pay to their drivers are less than the depreciation of the
> cars and the expense of keeping the drivers fed, housed, and healthy. They
> pay less than minimum wage in most markets, and, in most markets, that is
> not enough to pay the costs of a car plus a human.

> These business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and
> putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on
> desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to
> pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash
> now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills.

------
sunstone
Tesla is in the best position to win in this arena. As the article points out
it's cutthroat so the one with the lowest costs, acquisition and operation
will win.

Telsa makes it's own cars, the cars have super low operating costs: built for
1m miles, almost no ongoing maintenance, powered by electricity that is
already much cheaper than gas and will continue to get cheaper. And finally no
driver with self driving software.

No one else has this combination attributes for the lowest cost operation.
Though it could be Tesla after it's bought by Google.

------
miguelmota
Uber wants to be the Walmart of taxis where they start with super cheap
pricing to hook in new customers and then turn the switch on once everyone is
dependent on them.

It'll be very hard or impossible for Uber to be a monopoly and having more
competitors means the prices will have to compete to remain attractive to
people.

An unlikely idea for Uber becoming profitable is if they form a cartel with
Lyft and other Uber-esque services to give all users no choice but to pay the
high prices, but then they'll be competing with traditional taxi services once
again.

------
linuxftw
I think Uber can easily make money if they function more as a marketplace and
less as an opaque transportation company.

Their job is to connect riders to potential taxi providers (which is what they
are, since they're all 'contractors'). Contractors could have a rating that's
viewable before accepting a ride offer from the driver.

Fire almost all of their staff, just need a skeleton crew to keep the webstore
and ride-match stuff up. Stop wasting money on self driving stuff, it's never
going to happen. Take a flat rate per-ride, done.

------
chriselles
It’s so very hard to find any ride share profit Signal within all the Noise of
monetary policy and VC weaponisation of capital.

Airlines at least have the possibility of temporarily defending margins on
city pairs with mismatched supply/demand.

Perhaps surge pricing on ride share is an analog to that.

The accumulated debts of ride share players seems akin to picking up pennies
on ground getting stickier and the steamrollers are accelerating.

It will be interesting to see what happens if/when full spectrum subscription
ride share options become available.

------
losvedir
They have other lines of business. I think Uber Freight has a lot of potential
to make money (and might already be doing so?). I'm a little skeptical of Uber
Eats, though.

------
pochamago
What's the point of these speculative pieces that just list pros and cons?
Give me actual projections, explore what it would take for them to be
profitable. Otherwise it's just not that interesting

~~~
umeshunni
The people writing these pieces have neither the depth, nor the insights to
generate those projections. If they did, they wouldn't be writing blog posts
for ads clicks.

------
m3kw9
So UBER is just an more advanced cab company. You call a driver to drive you
from A to B. It tries to under cut the traditional cab company significantly,
and unfortunately that means a loss is needed until they can get rid of
drivers using autonomous systems. At that time when it will also drive the
cost down as they will Not be the only one with autonomous systems. It will
look more like a commodity unless you are an monopoly

------
Haga
The same way Amazon can make shareholder money back. Stay out of reach of the
law forever. In ueber case it bets on cutting out the trad taxicompetition-
one way or another.

Means ueber will want to be the market structure provider like Amazon for
rides Haring and bets on becoming mandatory for all mobility related services.

It really jars the mind- all those billions betted against trust busting.

------
tardismechanic
Here’s the full article:
[https://outline.com/endjbs](https://outline.com/endjbs)

------
crazygringo
Uber isn't in the taxi business, it's in the self-driving car business. Taxis
with drivers are just a stopgap, just like DVD's were a stopgap for Netflix.

The Economist is right that there are few real network effects or moats around
the taxi business. But Uber's valuation depends on it:

\- Developing the best driverless tech

\- Being able to roll driverless taxis out to an established customer base
faster and at far larger scale than anyone else (main advantage over
Waymo/Tesla)

\- Using a headstart in driverless tech, compared with huge data advantage
from millions of Uber rides, to maintain the #1 position

Of course all this depends on Uber being _able_ to develop the best self-
driving tech, and getting such a data+scale first-mover advantage to stay
ahead of competitors.

Skeptics will say Waymo will have the best tech, and expand/scale its taxi
service effortlessly, and thus that Uber's existing customer base doesn't
provide any advantage at all -- everyone will just jump ship from Uber to
Waymo.

~~~
natch
As a customer I would just use whatever is cheap, safe, and fun. Tesla M3P, no
chatty-but-dull driver = cheap, 5+ star safety rating = safe, and performance
= fun.

------
thelock85
Uber will eventually profit from long-term SAAS+Ops+robots contracts with
municipalities and governments, assuming they can grow/operate for that long
and out-lobby and out-execute Lyft, Ford, Tesla, Google et al.

------
mruts
I would say.. no?

The optimal solution would be an exchange that provided order books with
bid/asks for each passanger and driver.

Alternatively you could have a real-time auction to make it easier for the
passanger.

The exchange could take a 5-10% cut on each ride.

------
lpcam33
If I was a car manufacturer I would invest heavily on Uber. The fact that
people need to have a new car to work for Uber is one of the main factors that
keep the auto industry out of recession.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_people need to have a new car to work for Uber_

Quite the opposite. There have been complaints in this thread about how the
cars are getting shittier and shittier.

For Lyft for Oregon the car needs to be 2004 or newer for most of the smaller
cities, 2009 or newer for Portland. [https://www.lyft.com/driver-application-
requirements/oregon](https://www.lyft.com/driver-application-
requirements/oregon)

Uber is much the same. 15 years old in rural areas, 10 years old in Portland.
[https://www.uber.com/drive/eastern-oregon/vehicle-
requiremen...](https://www.uber.com/drive/eastern-oregon/vehicle-
requirements/) [https://www.uber.com/drive/portland/vehicle-
requirements/](https://www.uber.com/drive/portland/vehicle-requirements/)

Realistically, a 10 year old car is closer to "junkyard" than "new".

------
gyre007
I feel like there is a hidden metaphor for OSS companies hiding in this
article:

> Customers benefited, but no one else did

Customers being the users of OSS, the ones not benefiting being the companies
making it

------
connorcodes
Well, this may drive a crowd away, but maybe the best way for monetization is
to make Uber a subscription based thing. Obviously, it would have to be cheap
though.

~~~
xenospn
Moviepass tried do so the subscription thing on a very large scale and that
didn't really work. Netflix pulls it off since they own most of the content
and some of the distribution network.

~~~
scarface74
It didn’t work for Moviepass because they were trying to sell a subscription
at a price that was less than one movie a month.

AMC is doing it quite successfully. The difference?

\- they made a deal with the movie distributors to account for all shows to be
sold for $8.99. AMC keeps 50-70%. Worse case, AMC pays $6.30 per movie. Movie
Pass had to pay the full retail price.

\- AMC has crazy margins on concessions. Add to that the theatres with bars
and full restaurants.

\- They make money on pre movie advertising.

------
bigend
Is Uber yet selling the information on who took a ride, when, from where and
to where? I expect them to monetize that. Privacy? Is that something edible?

------
temp99990
I would love an all you can ride monthly subscription. I know Uber/Lyft have
done limited trials but nothing truly an unlimited subscription.

~~~
basementcat
I would totally Moviepass the crap out of this. Road trips across Utah and the
Colorado Rockies, Pacific Coast Highway, etc.

Amtrak used to have a similar pass arrangement.

~~~
temp99990
There would be limits for this to work, like a geofence

------
smartbit
[http://archive.is/LP5BL](http://archive.is/LP5BL)

------
thkim
Uber can't make money from taxi service. It's trying to mimic Amazon model
where profit comes from subsidiary service. Uber is yet to find such thing.
Without valid profit source I don't understand how SEC approves an IPO for a
license to suck away average joe investment. Uber is walking a very thin line
between being a hoax and a business.

------
wintorez
Uber is not making money? How? Why?

~~~
micael_dias
Their expenses are higher than their revenue.

~~~
askafriend
If I bought 10 McDonald's franchises today, my expenses would be higher than
my revenue for probably the entire first year if not more.

If things are going well, and I make another bet by buying 10 more, my
expenses would continue being higher than my revenue (even if the first 10
stores become profitable).

If I keep doing this, I may not show a profit on my balance sheet for a long
time.

This example illustrates why "expenses are higher than revenue" doesn't reveal
anything and that such a simplistic picture of a business is useless.

~~~
scarface74
What would it reveal if your marginal costs were greater than your marginal
revenue? Has anyone done a cohort analysis?

------
sjg007
If there is enough demand. So if people stop buying cars and rely on Uber then
maybe.

------
strathmeyer
Uber's plan is to own every car once self-driving cars are realized.

------
nsxwolf
Uber might make sense as a public utility. If it's going to lose money no
matter what, why not fund it like public transportation? Lots of taxes on the
back end offset by user fees to take some of the sting off and mitigate
overuse.

~~~
arcticfox
> If it's going to lose money no matter what, why not fund it like public
> transportation?

Why would we as a society care if Uber exists enough to socialize the cost of
it? I kind of like using Uber, but probably not enough to justify footing the
full bill for it (thank you VCs).

------
3327
Yes Uber can make money, once they have an EV that selfdrives.

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myrandomcomment
Yes, as soon as the car drives itself.

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everetm
Tesla rents out their ai customer owned fleet taxi service to Uber and Lyft

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la_fayette
Why use uber? Just take a bicycle...

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pbreit
Uber prints money on non-pool rides in mature markets. The losses are all
going to fund expansion and single-rider pools.

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0x262d
source?

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pbreit
[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519...](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1543151/000119312519103850/d647752ds1.htm)

$940 million in Contribution Profit in 2018 and that does not net out new
markets and non-pool rides.

So, to re-affirm more emphatically, Uber prints money on non-pool rides in
mature markets.

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klaudius
No. Relevant article by an expert:

    
    
      https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-nineteen-ubers-ipo-prospectus-overstates-its-2018-profit-improvement-by-5-billion.html

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Invictus0
What is the point of this article? If you're going to ask a question, do some
work to actually find an answer.

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cs702
Betteridge's law of headlines:

    
    
      "Any headline that ends
       in a question mark can be
       answered by the word no."[a]
    

This opinion piece makes a compelling case that profitability will be hard to
come by for Uber, Lyft, and their various smaller competitors.

[a]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

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tjmehta
Uber made 997 million in profit in 2018. Read the S1. ️ #fakenews

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foepys
Where do you get this from? They lost $3B in 2018. Uber's S1 clearly states as
one of their risk factors to maybe never make a profit.

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viburnum
Whether or not it makes money, Uber is making cities more polluted and less
safe already.

