The whole “Uber makes a profit on the ride” stat is broadly just creative accounting that counts the revenue and ignores most of the costs including the huge ba

The whole “Uber makes a profit on the ride” stat is broadly just creative accounting that counts the revenue and ignores most of the costs including the huge back office operation to build and support the app, marketing, admin, etc etc. Yes it’s good that they charge the customer more than they pay the driver, but that doesn’t translate into a “profitable transaction” from a business standpoint. If it takes $X millions in engineering costs to build and maintain an app required for that ride to have occurred then one needs to prorate that cost across each ride as a cost and so on. There are lots of examples of these creative “our transactions are profitable” claims like WeWork’s much ridiculed “Community Adjusted EBITDA” metric. The fancier your metrics need to be to show you are “profitable” the bigger the red flag should be that all is not well in Oz.