Which history are we seeing all over again? Amazon in 1997 losing money selling $5 books for $4, or pets.com losing money selling $50 bags of kibble for $40?
Yes, that was the point of the question: whether today's Uber is the first chapter of a larger plan to build a profitable business on top of a much simpler and possibly even inherently money-losing set of transactions, or whether it's already in its final form and is just a bad idea.