Uh huh. Adjusted, meaning EBITDA, or as Charlie Munger refers to them "bullshit earnings".
“I must first tell you about a new accounting rule – a generally accepted accounting principle (GAAP) – that in future quarterly and annual reports will severely distort Berkshire’s net income figures and very often mislead commentators and investors. The new rule says that the net change in unrealized investment gains and losses in stocks we hold must be included in all net income figures we report to you. That requirement will produce some truly wild and capricious swings in our GAAP bottom-line.” https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/2017ar/2017ar.pdf
No. Adjusted EBITDA. Meaning not EBITDA. EBITDA is not "bullshit earnings".
There's also the whole inconsistency with capitalizing software expenses... if you want to be aggressive about accounting, you certainly can.
But of course the biggest part of this story is stock-based comp, which is very much a real expense.
(1) uber owns nothing (mostly), and (2) depreciation doesn't really affect real-world profit/loss as a "regular person" expects. Its mostly an accounting tool (that often lets companies hide money). If you eg. build a building, you can depreciate ~10% a year in many cases, but that doesn't really mean you're losing/gaining money.
Eg. a residential building can depreciate at 5% a year. If you owned and rented a house in SF, its not decreasing in value by 5% a year, probably even considering cost of repairs/upgrades grows as a building ages (the purpose of this metric). So including a (-5% of building) depreciation amount on the earnings of said rental property makes little sense when evaluating if its "profitable".
In some countries development costs can be captalised, and the depreciated over future years (when that software is earning revenue)
Sort of ignores the fact that software is always a depreciating asset from the time you first start writing it
Thats Operational Expenditure (OpEx) not Capital Expenditure (CapEx) usually. Unless they own servers, or bought licenses to software, etc.