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> Uber and WeWork are just two high profile examples.

Uber does not have bad unit economics in its core rides business. It makes profit on rides, and it loses it on trying to expand into food delivery. You can easily see it if you just look at their financial reports.

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Obligatory "Not an accountant but": My understanding is that Uber assigns significant costs related to ride share to R&D, etc., to make it look like their rides business is profitable.

Certainly some segment of their core business is profitable. But at the end of the day, if all they have is a glorified cab company that is profitable in a few big cities and loses money everywhere else, that's not a story that sounds good to investors.

I doubt that: I think that would be serious securities fraud.

Not if they disclose their theory for why the salaries of those engineers should be going to general R&D rather than rideshare.

Is implication here that they are logging rideshare hours as self driving training data?

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