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by tedsanders 3359 days ago
Citation please?

Is there any public information that says Uber is losing money on every sale? I'm honestly curious. In my brief searching, I haven't found much. I'd love it if someone would point me to information on Uber's finances/economics that shows their negative gross margin in developed city markets.

My mental model of their finances is heavy fixed costs (~5,000 programmers) and near-zero marginal costs. The only way they are losing money on marginal rides is if they are paying drivers more than the fare. Do they? I honestly don't know.

1 comments

There have been leaks (from a while back) that show a loss in most markets (but not all). The spending involved is mostly from driver incentives, which takes some form of "paying drivers more than the fare[s they get]", but is often of the form "we will guarantee you make at least $X so long as you're online in that area during this time and accept at least y% of the requests".
Do you have links to these leaks? I'd like to learn more.