Uber is not going to be the Standard Oil of transportation, at best, it's got a hope of being the Walmart of transportation. Like other commenters have said, for Uber to get the level of defensive moats to achieve Standard Oil levels of monopoly and profitability, it doesn't just have to put Lyft and Sidecar out of business, it has to put private cars out of business. That's not going to happen.

The private transportation industry is interesting right now but I see a couple of pretty severe challenges down the road.

The first is the brutal price war that's coming down the pike. Right now, everyone's hiring pretty young white people as drivers because companies are engaging with a big PR push with regulators and they're able to still handsomely profit off disrupting inefficient cab companies.

But there's a reason why cab drivers are poorly paid and have horrible working conditions and it's because transportation has a hard time breaking out of a commodity status. Look at the airline industry in the 1950s vs today. The race to the bottom is something airlines have been fighting tooth and nail. The simple fact of the matter is that, despite all efforts to the contrary, only a tiny minority of consumers are willing to pay even a few dollars extra for a better experience. Once Uber bleeds millions of dollars being the first to fight all the regulatory battles, a Southwest is inevitably going to emerge to Uber's United.

The second major threat is that everyone can already see that the entire industry is going to be disrupted by the self-driving car and it's just a matter of when, not if. All of the private transportation companies are picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer. If they're smart, they're trying to figure out how to leverage what they have into a dominant position in a new industry but that is always a process fraught with peril.

Ultimately, I think the space has a lot of potential but let's not let wishful thinking get in the way of the brutal economics of this space.