Next up, gobbling up Lyft. Looks like they really want to be the monopoly at IPO time. At this rate, they'll probably IPO at more than $100 billion. Sigh, should've interviewed with them last year, haha
It's not much of a defeat. They get billions of dollars from a market they were never going to be allowed to dominate to begin with. The only outcome from day one for Uber was being forced out of China, no different than the problems Amazon / Google / Facebook / eBay have all run into in being prevented from competing normally in that market as they do in the rest of the world.
It's extremely unlikely that they'll IPO for anywhere near $100 billion, or even near their current valuation (for reference, the largest IPO in history is Alibaba with $25B). Their accounting practices most likely don't utilize GAAP, which is how they get around saying "we're profitable in the US", so I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually significantly losing money. Plus with the multitude of lawsuits against them right now, it's not hard to imagine they lose a good chunk of their valuation in the near future if the lawsuits don't really favor them.
They may IPO (if they are indeed profitable and don't want to keep looking for Series N style fundraising), although I doubt it, and if they did, it's definitely unlikely to be anywhere near $100 billion.
Although I was more focused on the IPO terminology, I still think my argument holds true that I don't believe that Uber would have a favorable IPO and that it's unlikely their current/future valuation would translate to market cap, because they're very likely not honestly profitable in their larger markets (e.g. US) because there's no proof they're going by their GAAP numbers when saying they're profitable in the US.
I would love to see documents like SEC filings from Uber, but they won't release those except to investors until they IPO, so it's a catch-22...
Different metrics. Alibaba raised $25B. Facebook's market cap was around $104B (intraday) upon their IPO, but they only raised about $16B in the offering.
