There is a reason we have a GAAP as a way of not letting companies just make up metrics. Any company can show a “profit” as long as you don’t count expenses that make you unprofitable. They leave out over a dozen expenses to claim some made up definition of “profitability”. From their numbers, how do you get that just the ride hailing business would make more money than it cost to run?
Adjusted EBITDA is just a made up term. It is isn’t GAAP so by definition it isn’t Generally Accepted. Made up metrics are generally used by startups and non profitable public companies to justify their valuations to investors.
This is a fundamentally "what-if" scenario so it's not going to be perfect math, but we can look for hints. To go from non-GAAP to GAAP, you can add the adjustments up. The biggest non-GAAP adjustment (around 2/3rds of total) is stock-based compensation. That $401 million in stock-based compensation really can't be repeated, and wouldn't have been so large if they had IPO'd sooner. The next big they spent another ~$250million on driver incentives, almost entirely on UberEats.
How much of their expenses are required for a theoretical rides-only Uber? Impossible to say; they don't break out spending by segment. But we can make some guesses. The rides product has now existed for many, many years. Did they really need to become a ~22,000 employee company if all they were going to do is rides? I would guess no. So the question here is really: how much of their current expenses do we think only exist due non-rideshare business? The autonomy program is evidently an expensive bust. I see a lot of scooter marketing, which we can tell from this report isn't selling. Food is growing but they're in 3rd place, and it seems like they spend a lot of money to even get to third. So really the question is: are >30% of their expenses due to the non-ride business? I would guess yes.
Adjusted EBITDA is just a made up term. It is isn’t GAAP so by definition it isn’t Generally Accepted. Made up metrics are generally used by startups and non profitable public companies to justify their valuations to investors.