Uber Spends A Fortune To Build A Monopoly

I’ve certainly made my antipathy toward the gig economy and Uber in particular well known. Uber’s basic business plan is to go into an area, violate the local rules and regulations, and hope that the service becomes so popular that local officials are afraid to shut it down. And, based on the most recent shareholders’ conference call, it appears that the other part of their business plan is to expand into as many areas as possible as quickly as possible in the hopes of creating an impregnable monopoly. To that end, Uber has apparently lost $1.2 billion dollars in just the first two quarters of this year. The company pointed to heavy losses in their now-abandoned attempt to expand into China as well as a price war with its only real competitor, Lyft. Uber has now lost around $4 billion in its short seven year history. But don’t worry about Uber too much – they have raised $16 billion so they have a few more years before they run through all that. But by far the most disturbing number in this latest report is that Uber believes that it controls somewhere around 85% of the market here in the United States. Does anyone believe that having one company in control of such a significant share of the market is going to work to the benefit of American consumers or workers? Me neither. It is really high time that antitrust laws in this country are actually enforced.