Uber might be the best business I've looked at all year and I still can't buy it. Am I overthinking this?

Spent a week on Uber and ended up somewhere weird, curious if anyone's hit the same thing.

The way I normally work: figure out the "laws" of a business — the stuff that'd still be true if you fired management and re-ran the decade — then read the destination off them. If I can see where it ends up, the only question left is *when*, and I can just sit.

Uber's laws are genuinely clean. Wait times fall with the square root of driver density, so it's a real flywheel — but a hill, not a cliff (a quarter of your density only doubles someone's wait, which is why Lyft never died). And a car costs about the same parked as driven while demand swings \~10x across a week, which is brutal if you own the fleet. Uber's whole trick is not owning it.

Here's the bit I liked: take the driver out and that problem gets *worse*, not better. Someone still owns a $150k asset that has to keep clearing. So aggregating demand should be worth **more** in an AV world, not less.

Great. Except the laws tell me demand aggregation is valuable — they say nothing about who actually **keeps** the money. That's bargaining power, and Uber's \~24.5% take only exists because nine million drivers are interchangeable. Swap them for two or three companies with a working driverless stack and it flips. Waymo just showed everyone how, walking away from Austin and Atlanta.

So I'm left with two Ubers about 10x apart in value and no way to pick between them. Too-hard pile. Not because it's a bad business — I think the bulls are probably right and \~20x forward isn't expensive — but "just sit through the drawdown" is terrible advice if you're in the wrong branch.

So what am I missing? Mainly: is this a real distinction, or am I dressing up ordinary uncertainty? And has anyone got a sane way to own something bimodal — sizing, options, anything?

No position. I wrote the long version up properly — bull case steelmanned, the numbers, and the specific things that would change my mind — [here](https://fmarinisecondopinion.substack.com/p/uber-uber-technologies-inc). But the short version above is the bit I'd actually like pulled apart, so happy to argue it out here.