All the politics surrounding Uber & Lyft operates in a bizarre alternate reality where they are viewed as some sort of massively profitable companies. In non-alternate reality they are massively *un*profitable https://twitter.com/VICE/status/1296160067683852298

In the 4 quarters preceding the pamdemic, Uber was cashflow negative by $4.7 billion. That is to say, they are burning through the equivalent of the market cap of a low-end S&P 500 company every year

Uber's own ~$50b market cap is entirely, wholly reflective of an expectation of future profits, not of any actual present-tense ones. I won't pretend to have any special insight on the ratiinality of that expectation but their current money-losing state is SEC reported fact

Being an Uber driver may or may not be a bad deal for the driver, that's in the eye of the beholder. But Uber is definitely *not* unjustly underpaying them and pocketing the difference

Uber is at present *subsidizing* the drivers by paying them dramatically more that Uber itself is collecting from the riders

In an ironic way, Uber is the most Marxist company in the world, transfering almost $5b a year from capital to labor

If that is not enough to provide acceptable remuneration for the drivers, the problem is not corporate greed. In that case the problem would be that ridesharing is a fundamentally uneconomic business

I've come around to a pretty sympathetic view of the cabbies they ran out of business- it's hard to win when you have to run a profit and the competition is willing to operate at a massive loss

But let's not go pretending that Uber is doing anything except 'operate at a massive loss'. Don't expect that you can somehow force an already unprofitable business to take on even higher costs and obligations and still operate