1) They are profitable because they are finding loopholes in relevant legislation, or,
2) they are profitable because they are injecting competition and new ideas into a stagnating industry dominated by government-protected monopolies (or oligopolies).
Your opinion of the law will likely depend on which narrative you find more persuasive.
We have no evidence of this, and this is scary to me, for various reasons.
Uber/Lyft/et al are all about trying to gain a "lock" on the industry. If they succeed, they're going to hose me, badly. If they fail, they're going to leave a big crater behind from all the taxis they drove out of business.
Not friendly.
That's what is so great about the fluidity of Uber, without medallions and regulation and such.
If Uber starts to increase prices because they have a monopoly, a lone person can build an app that's cheaper.
A lone person can create a new twitter and facebook too, it doesn't mean anyone is using it. I'm sure there are lone builders popping up every day. Is anyone using it, is there competition? - no.
It's very easy to convince drivers if you give them a bigger cut.
If neither is possible, then Uber has already optimized the market, and there is nothing to complain about.
Come on, keep some perspective. Uber is a taxi app. We're not talking about a Manhatten Project of software here. Duplicating the Uber experience is easy. 99% of the effort they're putting in there is the fights with all the governments, regulators, taxi unions etc.
Facebook and Twitter are not Manhattan projects either, but there's no real competition.
Right now Uber is using the VC money to break or ignore laws and create itself a monopoly.
If we really wanted to disrupt the Taxi business, you need to destroy all the regulation for everyone.
Collecting tax pennies and giving them away does not help, of course.
It does not matter what the right answer is; the playground needs to be equal.
If Facebook started charging for its services or otherwise pissing off its users in big and obvious ways, I guarantee there'd be a serious competitor on the streets within months.
In a world where Uber is charging monopoly rents, they compete on either price or features.
Monopolies work when there's a barrier to entry beyond name recognition.
>According to Bloomberg, the ridesharing startup took a net loss of $127 million in the first half of [2015], off less than $47 million in revenue.
Although it's possible that after interest, taxes etc, that they're not even profitable in the US yet.
[1] https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/uber-says-profitable-us-mu...