In August 2021, the consensus was that Uber was finished.
Critics argued that the company was a ‘bezzle’. It looked like a company, but it was actually a long con. Its putative core business, selling rides, was dressed up with regulatory arbitrage and accounting gimmicks to suggest future profitability, in order to separate credulous investors from their money now. According to the critics, at some point soon the investors would realize they’d been taken, dump their shares, and the whole enterprise would collapse.
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Doctorow’s language is explicit and blunt: pungent examples include “Uber was never going to be profitable. Never”, or Uber “is about to die.” And it included specific predictions.
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All five claims, taken together, congealed into a meme: Uber is a bezzle.1
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The simplest way to say what happened between 2022 and 2025 is not that Uber proved the critics wrong, but that Uber stopped being the same object the critique was describing. The company that achieved profitability in 2023 operates under different constraints, charges different prices, and extracts value differently than the company Horan analyzed in 2016 or Doctorow declared dead in 2021.
Several factors spurred the company to change. The obvious one was the pandemic, which delivered a massive shock to ride-hailing demand, temporarily collapsing trip volumes and forcing the company to confront how expensive its growth-at-any-price strategy was. Less obviously, when the pandemic went away, so too did the cheap capital that had been a feature of the markets from the 2008 global financial crisis onward. But those macro-environment shifts only provided an impetus; they weren’t the changes themselves.
So what were the changes that made Uber profitable?
It did exactly what its investors expected it to do: it charged riders more and paid drivers less.
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The critics had predicted this move, or something like it. What they didn’t predict was that Uber could pull it off without triggering the expected consequences. Horan’s model assumed that raising prices or cutting driver pay would invite one of three responses: riders would defect to cheaper alternatives, drivers would quit for better opportunities, or competitors would undercut Uber’s new margins.
None of these materialized at the scale required to discipline Uber’s pricing.
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The critics’ second major bet—that regulators would eventually force Uber to internalize its true costs—also failed to materialize as predicted, though not for lack of trying.
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On the expense side, Uber made cuts that would have been politically difficult before the pandemic forced the company’s hand. In 2020, it laid off thousands of employees and shed over $1 billion in fixed costs. More importantly, it abandoned the moonshot projects that had consumed capital without generating revenue.
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I’ll give them their due: Uber’s critics correctly identified that early Uber ran on subsidized growth disconnected from operational fundamentals, and correctly predicted that reaching profitability would require raising prices and squeezing drivers. They incorrectly predicted that Uber would prove unable to do this.