[LucidityOfPower]

Source: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/05/uber-ipo-profitability-value-labor-costs

The whole thing is super interesting. Some of the more "fun" info as excerpts:

First, some figures. Uber loses buckets of money. It lost $3.0 billion in 2018 on $11.2 billion in revenue from its basic operations. It sold its interest in a couple of other ride-hailing firms, which enabled it to book a profit, but despite a tripling in revenue since 2016, its losses were essentially the same in both years.
Then the fun begins, the disclosure of all the troubles facing the firm. For example, you might hope that these losses are just growing pains, although the company is ten years old. But, no: "we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the near term or at all."

A few more highlights:

The assumed initial public offering price of $_ per share is substantially higher than the net tangible book value per share of our outstanding common stock immediately after this offering. If you purchase shares of our common stock in this offering, you will experience substantial and immediate dilution.

In other words, by creating this stock and selling it to the public, we're slicing the ownership into millions of parts, meaning the new owners will collectively have a far smaller claim on the company than its previous owners. While this is true of all IPOs, it's one of several reasons to wonder why anyone buys into them.

And how much is the company actually worth? They've got an answer for that and it's not an inspiring one: "Our historical net tangible book value as of December 31, 2018 was $(7,620) million or $(0.02) per share."
Net tangible book value consists of the real assets of a company - its physical properties, like buildings and equipment - less its debts. By this valuation, Uber is $7.6 billion in the red. (Parentheses are how you do negative numbers in financial statements.)

Uber has had some serious issues with its reputation (a word that appears sixty times in the prospectus). As they say:

Maintaining and enhancing our brand and reputation is critical to our business prospects. We have previously received significant media coverage and negative publicity, particularly in 2017, regarding our brand and reputation, and failure to rehabilitate our brand and reputation will cause our business to suffer…. We have previously received a high degree of negative media coverage around the world, which has adversely affected our brand and reputation and fueled distrust of our company. In 2017, the #DeleteUber campaign prompted hundreds of thousands of consumers to stop using our platform within days. Subsequently, our reputation was further harmed when an employee published a blog post alleging, among other things, that we had a toxic culture and that certain sexual harassment and discriminatory practices occurred in our workplace. Shortly thereafter, we had a number of highly publicized events and allegations, including investigations related to a software tool allegedly designed to evade and deceive authorities, a high-profile lawsuit filed against us by Waymo, and our disclosure of a data security breach. These events and the public response to such events, as well as other negative publicity we have faced in recent years, have adversely affected our brand and reputation, which makes it difficult for us to attract and retain platform users, reduces confidence in and use of our products and offerings, invites legislative and regulatory scrutiny, and results in litigation and governmental investigations. Concurrently with and after these events, our competitors raised additional capital, increased their investments in certain markets, and improved their category positions and market shares, and may continue to do so.

And the firm operates in a reputational minefield:

If platform users engage in, or are subject to, criminal, violent, inappropriate, or dangerous activity that results in major safety incidents, our ability to attract and retain Drivers, consumers, restaurants, shippers, and carriers may be harmed, which could have an adverse impact on our reputation, business, financial condition, and operating results.

So, the company is losing billions, has essentially no underlying value, and its business could be hammered overnight. But it's not just that.
As Lacy put it in an interview soon after Kalanick's ouster, "The thing that's gonna kill Uber has nothing to do with who's at the company, has nothing to do with scandals, has nothing to do with any of this. The thing that's gonna kill Uber is when Uber finally has to charge what it costs to get a car to you."