Your argument is literally an appeal to authority.

But I’m sorry, I worked in world-class financial institutions before and what they do is wildly uneven.

When I was working at Drexel on the bond trading floor, a trader at Merrill named Howard Rubin made a series of bad calculations and proceeded to lose the company over a quarter billion dollars, back in the 1980s when a million was real money.

Such incredibly boneheaded things surface every few years. Remember AIG? Remember WeWork? Billions in value vanished overnight, in an obviously stupid scheme which involved taking on long-term obligations (multi-year leases) to service short-term, highly volatile assets.

“The smartest guys in the room” get caught up in hype just like everyone else.

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Uber needs to make money at some time in the future to justify their huge investment. Right now they lose 25 cents on every dollar they take in and no matter how much they grow, this stays constant.

Uber is already big enough that no magic economy of scale is going to appear.

Uber is also very bad for our hopes of not destroying the biosphere, because nearly every trip is a single passenger in a gasoline powered car.

At some point, the nations of the world are going to realize that they actually have to do something about the climate emergency, and Uber will go. Or, the nations of the world will leave us to our fate, and at some point Uber will go with everything else.

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If you’re so sure about this, you need to answer the question, “How and when will Uber be profitable?”