A paper titled "Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality" [1] was recently published by students at Stanford GSB that put forth a new model for valuing privately held companies [2]. If you consider "Table 8: Detailed Unicorns Fair Values and Post-money Valuations", Uber objectively has one of the smallest deltas of all valuations listed at 12% (bested only by Snapchat and Lyft out of ~100 companies).
I only skimmed these papers, but they seemed to be dealing with contract terms that caused later shares to have value not totally reflected in the per-share price, including but not limited to things like ratchets and liquidation preferences. Such that the valuation is that of a "unicorn" but that some conditions may apply if you want to realize that investment.
Nowhere did I find reference to the economics of Uber justifying their valuation. I should clarify my point: I don't think Uber is worth what they think they're worth based on the fundamentals. Certainly a bunch of tricky contracts could exacerbate that, but I think everybody bought into Uber at a valuation they were never going to sustain, and the ship is slowly crashing back to earth.
Nowhere did I find reference to the economics of Uber justifying their valuation. I should clarify my point: I don't think Uber is worth what they think they're worth based on the fundamentals. Certainly a bunch of tricky contracts could exacerbate that, but I think everybody bought into Uber at a valuation they were never going to sustain, and the ship is slowly crashing back to earth.