Leaked internal documents show Uber lost $20.4M in 2012, $56M in 2013, and more than $160M in the first half of 2014
and It Will Lose More Alex Hern / Guardian : Uber losing millions of dollars, documents reveal Nate Swanner / The Next Web : Here's why it's okay that Uber is losing a lot of cash right now Maya Kosoff / Business Insider : New revenue figures show $50 billion Uber is losing a lot of money Tweets: Farhad Manjoo / @fmanjoo : The biggest problem in these numbers for Uber is that someone is taking pictures of Uber's finances and sending them to @samfbiddle. Casey Newton / @caseynewton : I'm hearing disturbing reports that a fast-growing startup is losing money as it scales Erik Schwartz / @eriks : @Katie_Roof @MikeIsaac @samfbiddle It would be risky for Uber to assume eventual similar traction in markets with poorer demos than NYC/SF Katie Roof / @katie_roof : @MikeIsaac @samfbiddle depends on WHY they are unprofitable. re-investing in growth is one thing, losing money per transaction is another Chris Dixon / @cdixon : @Katie_Roof @MikeIsaac yep, all about gross margins/unit economics. Amazon's gross margins are 30% and rising https://ycharts.com/... Startup L. Jackson / @startupljackson : Startup math: positive unit economics + fast growth = short-term negative cash flow + long-term profits Dan Primack / @danprimack : Working furiously on breaking story about how @SlackHQ isn't profitable. Then one on @Pinterest. If I have time, @Snapchat. Dan Primack / @danprimack : Come on now Gawker. It's in the very next sentence. http://twitter.com/... Tyler Crowley / @steepdecline : Tech Journalists writing articles like “Unicorn X Company Isn't Profitable!” should be forced to take Business 101 - http://gawker.com/... Farhad Manjoo / @fmanjoo : Headline is about profit, but the revenue #s in @samfbiddle's Uber piece are more interesting. http://gawker.com/... http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Gawker's publication of Uber's internal financials turns what had been a matter of analyst guesswork into documented fact: losses compounding from $20.4M in 2012 to more than $160M in a single half of 2014, on a company then valued around $50B. The reaction captured in the coverage splits between alarm at the burn rate and defenses of subsidized scaling as deliberate strategy.
The leak also matters for how it was obtained — Farhad Manjoo's tweet about someone photographing Uber's finances for Sam Biddle points to a security-and-culture problem inside Uber itself, a theme that resurfaces later in the board's failure-of-oversight reckoning around Kalanick's removal.
First-order effects
- Uber's fundraising pitch now has to be made against its own paper: investors can see that each year of hypergrowth roughly doubled or tripled the cash burn, putting pressure on the valuation narrative behind the ~$50B figure.
- Commentary in the immediate coverage (Business Insider's new revenue figures, The Next Web's 'it's okay' defense) forces Uber's supporters to argue strategy rather than deny scale of losses.
Second-order effects
- Competitors and city governments reading these numbers learn precisely how large the subsidy per ride is, shaping both rival fundraising and municipal resistance to Uber's pricing model.
- Inside Uber, the leak deepens the paranoia and information-control culture; the same governance vacuum later produces the budget-cutting and layoffs-era morale collapse documented after the IPO.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — and the corpus shows adjusted EBITDA losses still widening to $842M in late 2019 and a net loss of $2.9B by Q1 2020 — the venture-subsidized ride model becomes a decade-long experiment in buying market share with investor capital rather than reaching profitability through scale.
- The eventual accounting comes due publicly: by 2022 Uber has lost roughly $30B in five-plus years and pivots to cost discipline, retroactively vindicating the 2015 skeptics who read the leaked numbers as unsustainable.
The trend: This leak is an early data point in the arc from growth-at-all-costs venture subsidy toward the post-IPO reckoning in which Uber spent years burning tens of billions before being forced into cost discipline.