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Re:Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion by ryanfreeborn on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @08:44PM (#11819537)
I can't imagine the incessant legal and legislative battles they are fighting are coming cheap. That means hiring legal and policy people, paying a ton of money to outside counsel, lobbying expenses, the hidden costs of building influence.

And it's at a huge, because most of this isn't happening at the federal level (yet)—it's all state and city—which means they don't have the luxury of concentrating on the familiar, well-tread (and very insular) game of DC politics. Instead Uber has to have boots on the ground in a ton of places, and they have to have people knowledgable on the nuances of regional politics and culture. Things like the dynamics of a state's house vs senate, country executives, the port authority, taxi unions, legal systems, initiative systems, local elections, Chambers of Commerce. The list really does go on and on. It's a huge and complex footprint to manage.

Re:Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion by cmurf on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @10:29PM (#11819957)
Yeah I think that's probably true but as a private company we don't know how significant these costs are. I think it's questionable to have a business plan predicated on suing your way out of being considered a taxi when in pretty much every way that matters, except one, it's a taxi (or limo, or a hybrid) service. And that one exception is that it has a decent Ux in large part due the Uber app and its backend infra (which is huge).
Re:Uber Turns to Saudi Arabia for $3.5B Cash Infusion by MicroBerto on Thursday June 02, 2016 @12:06AM (#11820297)
Like spending $8 MILLION in Austin just so they could upset the citizens and lose what should have been an easy battle....