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Comment by tomalpha | Hacker News Reader

> They have made their bucketloads of money

I agree with your broader point, but Uber lost some 8.5 billion USD last year. They're not (yet, at least) making bucketloads of money, despite paying their workers badly.

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To be clear, they have made bucketloads of revenue, they lost profit. The OPs point was that now that they have practical market dominance, regulations will most likely favor them compared to small start-ups.

Focusing on revenue and revenue growth makes sense for some companies, especially ones where you can expect economies of scale to eventually become a major factor.

When the company's business model is this transparently an elaborate scheme to sell dollar bills for $0.75, though, focusing on revenue starts to seem like either committing or being taken in by a very elaborate version of lying by omission.

They have no dominance, they just proved to a bunch of other taxi companies up to which point their business model is viable.

And by relaxing the regulations they will be making that job for smaller startups only easier.

I am so confused by Uber's financials.

I do not understand what they spend well over 8.5 billion on.

Their software for riders and drivers is quite good and certainly tons of engineer-hours have been poured into the front and back ends.

Are they paying their drivers more than they're charging riders? Or have all the billions gone into their moonshot projects like self-driving cars? Both?

Because otherwise, to me it's almost like, how do you not turn a profit on rides? Once they've got their app and infrastructure going (again, no small expense) then any rides they arrange should be profit.

Clearly, I am misunderstanding something about their business to an astronomical degree but I don't think I'm alone.

Advertising is expensive and probably invested money in new ventures.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/08/uber-to-l...

They probably spent well over $1bil on their autonomous driving research (which didn't pan out).

They're losing money every ride, or so I read somewhere, like $16 each time?

I think that's just the $8.5B loss restated as (total loss) / (number of rides), right?

Dara seems to be doing well for himself.

https://observer.com/2019/09/uber-ceo-dara-khosrowshahi-tech...

Doesn't that just mean that Uber's investors are doing badly? I'm assuming most of their (regular) employees are being handsomely compensated.

Hilariously, years of multibillion dollar losses with no path to sustainability have yet to translate to a lower stock price.

Indeed, the ultra-cynical view is that they are now desperate for government regulation to ossify the market because without a lock in (similar to what taxi companies used to enjoy pre-Uber) profits drop to 0 and stay there.

Raw capitalism should drive companies like Uber out of business as a billion-dollar company. They can always be undercut by a group of drivers in a locality starting a new app and stealing the local regulars (identical service, lower cost because no Uber premium) leaving Uber with only non-local traffic. Apps are not expensive.

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