That's an interesting thought experiment.

At the high level, Amazon is also primarily a logistics and pricing company.

They could also license their tech (or white label it a la Shopify) and make a lot of money, but they realized at some point that owning the user relationship was key to unlocking more value than just owning the tech.

I think Amazon is licensing that tech to all 3rd party sellers now right?

Most companies prefer logistics/pricing models to be profitable. Being a pump-and-dump for VCs isn't something they can license out.

Isn't that just tuning compared to the race as a loss leader for market share?

No. This isn't a software company.

Uber isnt a software company?

I'm not sure they'd make as much as owning the network end to end. Vertical integration is hot right now, see Apple. Uber already has delivery via freight as well as getting into air delivery, so why would they need to license it? It just makes more sense to keep the tech proprietary and use it for their various enterprises.

It's tough to say, I think profitability would come faster than being a taxi company with an app (disregarding freight and air for now). But I think there is a much wider prospective customer base and recurring revenue licensing the tech stack as a SaaS. And that's not to say they have to give up Uber as a taxi company while they do both. It's a much more reasonable moonshot than the autonomous driving experiment they did that killed someone moving fast and breaking things. I see a lot of value there.