They laid off 400 marketing employees in July[1], out of 1200 total. If you assume an average salary of $75k (not sure how accurate that is; just the average in my non-CA market per Google) and a cost to Uber of 1.3-1.4x that (so ~$100k), that cut $13M every 3 months (of ~$40M for the team total). That's just payroll for 1 team and they employ 22k employees worldwide and 11k in the US. It's not difficult to see them spending $5B every 3 months.

1: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/29/uber-cuts-about-400-jobs-fro...

You think Uber is just a bunch of servers?

Marketing, regulatory compliance, accounting, product development, operations, support, legal, price subsidies, offices, HR.

Those entire departments (and surely more I have forgotten) have staff, expenses, operational costs.

They run in 60 countries. 60!

They are paying for your cheap rides.

Most of it is going to the drivers.