Agreed. The thing that seems especially bonkers to me is that the theory of Uber is that you could turn a low-margin business into a high-margin business by a) shifting most of your risk (opex, capex, labor costs) to low wage workers too desperate to negotiate a fair deal, and b) spending massively to get Google-ish monopoly pricing over a key activity.

Point A is looking more and more false. Uber took on a lot of costs; instead of running a very lean operation, they spent like a tech company. They're having a hard time weathering this downturn. Governments are catching up to them on their labor-isn't-labor regulatory arbitrage, and I expect that come 2021, they'll see national-scale questions about their worker exploitation.

Point B is looking even worse. Once they failed to kill Lyft, extracting monopoly rents went out the window. And now a bunch of well-funded organizations with strong brands are coming after their business with autonomous cars. It won't be easy competing with Google on software. It won't be easy competing with GM on cars. And plenty of companies have brands compatible with becoming a preferred transportation provider. E.g., imagine BMW's autonomous car service. Or even worse from Uber's perspective, Costco. That's something like a quarter of American households.

It's perfectly plausible to me that Uber will never hit breakeven in terms of total profit exceeding total investment. By 2040, they could be in the same bucket as Groupon: an early darling that still exists but people barely remember.