I’m not arguing they’re keeping it vacant, that’s someone else in the thread.

I reject the notion that the units are not making money, and the notion that they are competing on price. We know corporate landlords engage in cartel behavior using price setting algorithms, and there is a deep well of tax-incentives for real estate (eg 1031s) that make it a more complex math problem than you are making it out to be.

How did Uber et al. offer services below cost until they'd driven out all competition? The property holdings are not these landlords' only source of income. Why would milk producers deliberately dump millions of gallons of milk (representing a commensurate amount of labor to both produce and then dispose of)? Because they've created an oversupply that threatens to destabilize the price.

The math works, it's just heinous.

I never understand why people think Uber is some kind of mic drop. I don't like Uber as a company, but Uber is vastly better than the system it replaced. It this a generational thing? Are the people casting Uber as archvillains just too young to remember not being able to get a cab at 9PM, or having their cabs kick them out halfway to their destination because they decided to go on a break?

I think it's largely revulsion that Uber ignored regulations, with the revulsion mostly coming from the types of people outraged by things like Newsom's recent CEQA reform.

They support these sorts of stifling rules and believe that skirting or changing those rules is a right-wing ultra-capitalist attack on the public good, despite the situation actually being the exact opposite.

I think it's less the ignored regulations (I'm also happy with the CEQA reforms), and more that they engaged in predatory pricing schemes to stifle competition. This has resulted in a duopoly that engages in politicking to lock in their position and suppress labor rights (e.g. Prop 22).

That does seem to be a right-wing capitalist attack on the public good? Like, do we still believe in markets, or are we just cool with mega-corporations setting prices and wages?

"Uber" was not the mic drop; "[Company] can use 'losing money today on one venture' as a business tactic, in search of higher future profits, if it has another source of cash to cover its losses," was, at least in the sense that it directly answered your question as to how a business losing money on one front could continue to operate. The company doesn't matter; loss-leading is not rare or unknown.