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.