When a management with a reputation for brilliance tackles a business with a reputation for bad economics, it is the reputation of the business that remains intact.

                        --- Warren Buffett

Expedia makes money from advertising (12%), from bookings fees, and from buying blocks of hotel rooms at a discount then selling them for higher prices to their customers (66%). [1]

All of these revenue models are something that is pretty obvious how you make money at. And all of them are very different than crowd-sourcing rides for which it is not clear that the market prices is higher than the cost of providing the ride.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/08/28/how-expedia-makes-...

To further your second point. A whole cottage industry has sprung up around AirBnB. To me this indicates that the business model for AirBnB is working. There is no similar thing happening w/ uber. Seems to just be a question of who (uber or the drivers) is going to absorb the losses.

Most importantly he hasn't had a single negative mention since he took over. the company had a couple bad things disclosed that were holdovers from the old regime, but none of it was his as far as we know. he also hasn't had any seriously positive news, but for uber no news is good news.

> it seemed like he did a really exceptional job profitably growing Expedia.

Expedia comes a distant second Booking Holdings. https://finance.yahoo.com/quotes/EXPE,BKNG/view/v1

So while he may have done well, he didn't do as well as the competition.

but did he grow Expedia's marketshare relative to its competitors?