True, but you can make a ton of money when you design a system where you have no labor costs (drivers make no net income). It's not $70 billion, but it is on the order of billions carried out for a decade. Perhaps that is why Uber is so ... nasty. Even with their scummy tactics and greyball and whatnot, they still can't make ends meet.

Also, what is stopping them, or anyone else, from running the same scam with other large capital expenditures? AirBnB could do this with houses, DoorDash could do this with heavy industrial kitchen equipment, etc. It's evil as hell, but Wall Street backed VCs have no issues finding people to do it.

It's almost like transport is a mature industry, with lots of competition, decades if not centuries of research on cost reduction, and running on thin margins!

I said this before, Uber should seriously consider closing down its operation in other countries. It is expanding virtually exponentially (they have a huge engineering team) for the type of company they are running. They need to focus on the U.S. market. They are losing way too much money everywhere combiend.

Microsoft did this with the Xbox One (almost all the extra features they advertised were US only) and it completely destroyed their market share, making the PS4 sell 2-to-1. WhatsApp went the other way (the US doesn't matter, you want the global market) and it got them a $19 billion sticker price. The US is a market, not the market.

That's a very bold statement to make with zero knowledge of the financials.

No, but the loan sideline allows to classify the drivers as contractors.

And there's externalities. No properly run bank would issue a car loan to an Uber driver, they'd run the math for the applicant and find it isn't going to work out. But Uber with its infinite pockets does not have to consider profitability, and eventually the driver has to declare bankruptcy and becomes a burden on the public pocket. It's a disgrace.