My knee-jerk reaction to the shocking scale of losses reminded me of Amazon during the dot-com days of the late 90s and early 00s. They seemed to bleed vast sums of money every quarter. And now they seem absolutely rule online retail.
Granted, it took a long time to get to this stage.
Well, that and finding out that AWS could make $5B/yr.
The difference was Amazon intentionally spent every dime reinvesting in their infrastructure and fulfillment pipeline. Uber is pricing themselves below cost to gain market share. It could be a winning strategy for Uber, but comparing them to Amazon is very superficial at best.
Google image search cab company owner and then explain where the billions in profit are hiding in the system.
They will be wildly profitable if they can just outlast taxis and lyft...
i.e. they would be wildly popular if they just didn't have any competition?
Why would that make them wildly profitable? You have to find margins better than a taxi company somewhere and not just assume they exist because it's an app.
(I keep making this same post for some reason.)
...and outlast the degradation of their own service. In my admittedly limited experience here in Seattle, the quality of cars and drivers has been going down.