To be fair Amazon is profitable, but their stock is extremely inflated by over speculation. The idea is still the same. Dump cash into the stock and hope others do the same driving up the price of the stock in the hopes that you can drop it before the bubble pops.
what does that statement even mean? Pick one {Lyft, Uber} and cross out the other one because it goes bankrupt. Now there's way less overhead per ride because you don't have to aggressively market, and your only costs are infra, insurance, and driver filtering, increase your fares by a bit (because less competition) and drop your take from the drivers to make them happy. Do you not then see this as a money printing machine?
(1) Uber and Lyft have worse unit economics than a taxi company because taxi companies leverage some little bits of scale by pooling fleet ownership costs and insurance.
(2) Uber and Lyft are currently pricing rides at about 66% of what it costs to provide.
(3) There's no loyalty.
(4) There's no indication that people are willing to pay what it costs to provide their service, doubly so if its actually more expensive than a taxi due to efficiencies stated in [1].
(5) Self-driving cars are a ruse in this context; many companies are developing them at the same time and when one gets them, shortly after, the other will too. And so will all the car companies itching to get into ridesharing (I'm looking at you, Tesla).
To my knowledge, while Amazon wasn't turning a profit in the early days, re-investing in growth, they weren't selling you $20 bills for $12 in the hopes someday "drones" would allow them to turn a profit.
We have absolutely no idea what would have happened to Amazon if they prioritized profit over growth in the early years. There's no guarantee they'd be a successful company now in that alternative future. Undercutting the competition on prices to increase sales volume in the early years was key to their success.
