[wpietri]

This would make sense to me if they had a decent business. But they are currently losing money hand over fist [1]. If they stabilize as is, they don't look like a good IPO target to me. The median amount taken in by an IPO in 2016 is $94.5 million [2], which would cover less than 2 weeks of Uber losses at their current burn rate. (Surely their IPO won't be the median size. E.g., Facebook's brought in $16 billion. But at that point, Facebook had been in the black for 3 years and their profit for their last full year was a billion dollars.)

Can they raise rates enough to get to break even before IPO? Maybe. But that would drastically reduce pressure on their competitors. Lyft is growing fast. Uber can really only justify their current valuation if they end up with no real competitors and can extract monopoly rents.

So I think their CEO needs to do a lot more than stabilize things. They either need to find a way to make the current business work much better (something I'm skeptical exists) or to drastically change the business to one where they have more of a moat.

My guess, though, is that they have run out of "greater fools" [3], and that the public market would realize that Uber, at least as currently constituted, is not a high-margin tech company but a low-margin discount taxi dispatch company.

[1] https://www.axios.com/exclusive-uber-financials-2475912645.h...

[2] https://www.wilmerhale.com/uploadedFiles/Shared_Content/Edit...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory