Profit +44%, stock -27%. Will Uber's robotaxis get away?

Imagine a company that has been growing over 21% for three consecutive quarters, earns nearly 10 billion dollars in free cash flow annually, has 199 million monthly active customers, and just reported the best operating profit in its history. Now imagine that the same company's stock has lost more than a quarter of its value since last October and is trading where it stood in spring 2025.

That's precisely today's Uber Technologies $UBER . The stock closed on July 8 at $73.58, while at the start of last October it stood at an all-time high of $100.10. Year-to-date 2026 it's roughly 10% in the red, at a time when, by its own numbers, the company is performing better than ever before.

The explanation has a name familiar to anyone who has opened financial reports in the last year: robotaxis. Alphabet's Waymo $GOOGL already carries paying customers in eleven U.S. metropolises and is headed toward one million rides per week. Tesla $TSLA launched its own autonomous service in Austin and promises expansion to other cities. And the market asked a simple question: what good is a platform that intermediates rides with drivers in a world where cars don't need drivers?

The January verdict from research firm Melius Research merely crystallized this anxiety. Analysts downgraded the stock to "sell" with a $73 target price – exactly where the stock stands today. Yet a few months later quarterly results sent the stock up more than 8% in a single day. The market clearly doesn't know what to believe.

So what exactly is Uber: a future casualty of the autonomous revolution whose business model is slowly eroding, or the cheapest ticket to a market that management itself estimates to be worth trillions of dollars?