Uber Technologies, Inc. (NYSE:UBER) has lost nearly a third of its market value over the past year, closing at $69.89 on September 22. The reason is not the business. Gross bookings rose 22% in constant currency in the second quarter, the fourth quarter running above twenty percent, and free cash flow passed $10 billion over twelve months for the first time.
What the market is pricing is robotaxis. Waymo has ended its Phoenix partnership with Uber and told the company it will launch its own app in Austin and Atlanta from January 2028. The fear is straightforward. If self-driving fleets can reach riders directly, Uber becomes unnecessary.
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The Market is Charging Nothing for the Business it Has:
Start with what Uber is today. It trades at about fifteen times its past year’s profit, a multiple usually attached to companies that have stopped growing. Bookings rose 22% last quarter.
Free cash flow is the part that changed the argument. A company generating more than $10 billion a year does not need anyone’s permission to fund its own future, and Uber is paying for its autonomous program out of money it already produces.
The Waymo departure reads differently up close. Losing one partner matters less when several others have signed on. Uber launched a robotaxi service with Wayve in London this month, which is Wayve’s first commercial deployment anywhere, though it runs with a safety driver and a fleet of about fifteen cars. Uber has also invested in Lucid and Nuro, with robotaxis due in San Francisco, and agreed with Pony.ai to put more than 2,000 vehicles on European roads. It has separately backed Waabi, which is building self-driving trucks.
That is the real asset. Building a self-driving car is a hard technology problem, and several companies are getting there. Filling one with paying passengers all day is a demand problem, and nobody aggregates demand at Uber’s scale.
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The Threats Are Real and the Spending is Rising:
None of that makes the bear case silly. Waymo leaving is evidence, not noise. The most advanced operator looked at the economics and decided it would rather keep the whole fare.
The earnings picture is messier than the bookings. Across the past twelve months, net income is down roughly a quarter. Both that stretch and the one before it contain large one-off tax gains, so the comparison says less than it looks. Profit in the latest quarter was sharply higher than a year before, but much of that came from writing up the value of stakes Uber holds in other companies. Neither figure is a clean read on the business.
Uber is also committing on a second front. It has launched a tender offer for Germany’s Delivery Hero worth about $14.8 billion, which it does not expect to complete until the second half of 2027. That is a large deal to absorb while the core market is being redefined.
Regulation remains a running cost. A Dutch regulator fined Uber $966 million in August over automated driver suspensions, a decision Uber is appealing. The labor model underneath the platform is still contested.
Conclusion:
Uber is producing record bookings and its first ten billion dollars of annual free cash flow, and it is being valued as though the robotaxi era has already taken its customers away. The threat is genuine, and Waymo’s exit is the strongest evidence for it. However, autonomy still has to solve the harder half of the problem, which is finding riders, and Uber has assembled a roster of partners rather than depending on any one of them. The number to watch is whether free cash flow keeps compounding while the autonomous spending runs. On the cash the business actually throws off, an investor is paying for Uber as it is today and getting the option on what it becomes for very little.
Market Sentiment:
Uber Technologies Inc was held by 151 hedge funds with a combined stake value of about $9.3 billion at the end of Q2 2026 in the Insider Monkey database. This is down from 153 hedge fund holders with a cumulative investment value of around $9.3 billion in the previous quarter.
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This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
