Uber is an interesting company in that they were always shady, but initially in ways that customers liked (somewhat illegal taxis ripping off their drivers, for below cost, subsidized lifestyle by VC).
They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).
I’m old enough when the VC model was “I dunno, ads?”, followed by “SaaS/cloud”, then “Uber for X” all of which proceeded “crypto” and “AI”.
A lot of it stacks now with “AI for X” running in the cloud funded by SaaS and/or ads. Just increasingly adversarial revenue models to turn customers into product (data) and/or hooked on forever recurring increasingly monthly spend.
Long gone the days of funding a piece of software customers purchase and use as long and as much as they wish.
I've been saying this about Google since the 2000s. The "don't be evil" slogan meant "prioritize growth over profit for now." And if anything, I find profit-taking more honest than loss-leading.
This is why I found GOOG engineers I’ve met the most insufferable. Note I’m east coast so sample size is under 10…
But they all universally had a rather smug attitude that what THEY were working on was morally above what the rest of us were because they were just doing non-commercial r&d loss making stuff.
They didn’t sully themselves with anything to do with the core business!
Of course this steps over the darker aspects of the core business which funds their generous “non commercial” fun jobs…
It can happen. I thought the Internship movie was just a movie and Google engineers don't really say things like "I'm busy trying to make the world a better place," but turns out that's sometimes what they say. At least before layoffs started.
They then flipped the "make a profit" switch and are now shady in ways customers dislike (ripping you the customer off).