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Comment by disgruntledphd2 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I've been a consistent Uber-bear since 2016, so am pretty surprised by this. Only another 30 years or so of profits like this to repay their accumulated loss!

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As a Uber-bull I'm grateful that I no longer have to point out that "Uber subsidizes rides" isn't true and hasn't been for years.

> "Uber subsidizes rides" isn't true and hasn't been for years

given that they have full control and zero transparency over price of every trip, how can you be so certain?

They're a public company and have to report financials. You can look at them and see that net margin on a ride is positive.

That doesn't mean they're not subsidizing individual markets to remain competitive though. It just means the average is marginal.

IIRC Uber lost $2B on the Chinese marketing simply because of subsidies.

> IIRC Uber lost $2B on the Chinese marketing simply because of subsidies.

uber pulled out of china in 2016 ...

Because it was a loss leader. It's proof that Uber subsidizes individual markets differently.

it's proof they subsidized, past-test, 7 years ago.

its really weird to point to what uber did more than 7 years ago as non public company with no public reporting requirements, and try to use that to refute publicly reported numbers from today.

They have lost $31.5B since 2014 and turned a profit just now. Where did that money go? That one Beyonce party, or it still might have had something to do with their main thing, the rides?

What exactly would "subsidize" mean in this context? If they're charging way less than they need to break even isn't that technically a subsidized ride?

Don't forget it also has to repay not just the cash losses but the opportunity cost from the money you could've made by just parking it in an index fund instead of investing in Uber. When you factor that in, it's probably more like 50 years before Uber actually becomes "a good investment".

Uber was a good investment for all of their private investors until SoftBank. For many of those investors, it was the best investment they ever made (see Benchmark, for example). For very late stage private investors who entered when the company was valued around $50B, it's more complicated and depends on the entry and exit timing. But rest assured that the returns to all investors who bought their stake before 2015 greatly exceeded their opportunity cost.

That's not too bad - they only have to bring that down to 4-7 years to get in sync with their valuation!

It's only a profit because of a gain in their equity holdings.

> recognized a $386 million unrealized pre-tax gain related to the revaluation of our equity investments

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