Uber started in 2009. It incurred losses every year until 2023 except for a profit in 2019 which was due to selling subsidiaries in various countries. Numbers before the IPO are difficult to obtain, but it lost 31.5 billion from 2016 to 2022. Let’s assume a loss of equal to funding during the pre-IPO period, so 24.7 billion. This seems reasonable, since Uber never made a profit during the period.
So we’ll estimate Uber’s total losses at 86.2 billion from 2009-2022.
In 2023 Uber made a profit of 1.9 billion and in 2024 it made a profit of a little under ten billion. Prices for rides on Uber are between ten to twenty percent higher than taxi rides, rising to as much as 50% higher during surge pricing periods (when there’s the most demand.) Driver’s on average, get paid less than taxi drivers used to.
So–the workers get less, the customers pay more.
The strategy, as many people noted, including myself, was for Uber and Lyft to drive taxis out of business by undercutting their prices. Uber and Lyft didn’t need to make a profit, while taxi companies did. Once they had gained dominant market share, they raised prices and took oligopoly profits.
Everyone knew this was the play, and that people were getting subsidized rides now (Uber was much cheaper than taxis in the early years) in exchange for getting fucked over later. Well we’re now in the sandpaper condom period of “ride sharing”, where investors earn back their investment by hurting everyone else.
This should never have been allowed. Uber and Lyft violated massive numbers of laws and were just allowed to do so thru non-enforcement. The end result was obvious and it’s here now: worse wages, higher prices and less ability to regulate the industry.
This sort of stupid is why everything keeps getting worse. Every part of the “sharing economy” (which is no such thing) has made the lives of ordinary people worse. AirBnB in particular helped drive the rise in rental prices in hundreds of cities.
All that most tech-bro firms do is find a place where there isn’t market power, and try to add it. Same with Private Equity, which buys up entire industries in order to form oligopolies and monopolies, as it’s doing in the housing market now.
Market power always means more money for a few rich people and higher prices and worse income for everyone else involved in any given industry.
Welcome to the tech-bro future and remember, Soylent Green is people and so are high profits, always.
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