Slack's operating loss send easier to recover from. Uber will have to cut costs massively to come closer to profitability. The drop in stock is before the lock in period had expired. Expect it to drop further after October when all the employees dump their stock.
I'd be interested to know how much of those costs are due to driver incentives and other costs related to expansion into new geographic regions vs. costs for established regions.
It could be that cutting costs is as simple as slowing down or pausing the expansion.
Both of your points are likely true. Slack probably could become profitable on a near-term basis, but that is not what investors are paying for. I believe Slack is trading around 30x revenue, so the market is expecting continued growth. At the same time, I believe it also has an eight year burn rate at current operating losses and cash on hand so it has a lot of time before it needs to cut expenses. I don't really like how this article fixating on quarterly operating earnings as a proxy for how the Vision Fund is performing while ignoring the investment cost basis.
I think his point is that if they could be profitable by not expanding right now, then it's plausible they could expand to takeover the world and once they have the world and no more expansion is needed they'd be profitable.
