A lot of movie productions infamously do not have positive cash flow. They deduct profits by creating artificial expenses charged by other companies providing services.

If they did have profits they’d get double taxed (once on the company’s profits and then again in payroll taxes if they decide to disburse profits to employees). They’d also have to pay out royalties on profits in some cases.

It’s usually pointless to look at reported profits from growth oriented startups, because if they reported income it means they are not properly reinvesting into growth (hiring engineers, bonuses for engineers, marketing, etc).

It’s much better to look at unit economics. Frankly, if cab companies made it work there’s no reason Uber cannot, and no reason the unit economics for Uber would be negative. It’s not as if Uber et al invented something new. They’ve basically improved almost every aspect of the taxi system it replaced, and done so with software technology so the marginal cost of the improvements is almost $0.

Just because the product is labor driven and low margin doesn’t mean it cannot be profitable. Amazon is a fundamentally low margin business as well (retail). The margins don’t matter so long as it can scale well, and software almost always does.