No, "Uber passengers paid only 41% of the cost of their trips for the fiscal year ended in September 2015." Prices have not changed much since then, so they are a long way from break even.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-profitability/true-p...

That's assuming the only reason they paid that much of those trips was because of price. That's not true of how Uber operates.

They do a lot of things like driver incentives (for being logged on a certain amount of time etc, or for signing up in the first place - a lot of this is during market setup for a given city), complete discounted rides based on new signups for riders, etc. You can assume as their penetration into the market saturates for both drivers and riders that both of these costs will diminish.

A lot of people on Hacker News being US based also ignore the fact that Uber is highly international. I use it almost everywhere I travel for work, I think Malta was one of the few places they weren't. Lyft and similar competitors are mostly either US-specific or even city-specific. There is a lot of different economies in other regions to look at.

Prices haven’t changed much in the US but Uber has divested some of its most expensive investments around the world (China, Russia, APAC).

thats 3.5 year old data (data started in FY Sept 2014) in a hugely changing and dynamic market, so basically not useful.

I work at Uber. We have publicly released financial statements each quarter. For q4 last year, our rides business was contribution margin positive (aka, it makes money). What loses money for us is R + D, and growth in new products (freight, eats, etc)

I notice you don't actually provide actual data to make a point. Which destroys your argument.

41% is such a ludicrously large way from 110% you need some real data to back it up. Further pretending the start date is means the data is a full year older is silly. At best you can have 2 more years of fiscal data.

I just don't get where the money goes if that's true.

If I pay $10 for a ride, $7 goes to the driver, which covers all the cost for the car, gas, his wage etc.

$3 goes to Uber. What marginal costs do the have for my ride that are anywhere close to that?

16,000 employees. Salaries, benefits.

Global facilities and infrastructure.

Numerous exploratory business ventures, like Uber Eats.

What you're saying is that you've never built a $10 billion sales, global corporation before. Which is very understandable, few have.

> Numerous exploratory business ventures

This is my original point!