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Possibility: seeing all this, Uber looks hard at what they do have and simply becomes contract cab dispatcher for all cabs everywhere, smartly choosing which cab to call to the scene of the caller using their algorithms. And lets existing can companies so the actual driving.

Why? Currently some cab companies have shitty apps, others have none. Your chances of getting a cab in a suburb of an unfamiliar city is zero. Uber can fix that.

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The question then becomes: Is a global taxi dispatcher worth 70 billion dollars? Maybe. Probably not.

My hunch is yes. I decided to do some quick math.

-NYC has ~13,605 licensed taxicabs.

-The average annual net income for a NYC taxi (in 2015, probably a bit lower now) was $58,555.

-$58,555 * 13,605 = $796,640,775

This figure is for taxis only, in one (big) city. It leads me to think that $70 billion is not an absurd number, globally.

edit: sources: https://www.yellowcabnyctaxi.com/blog/new-york-city-taxi-rev...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City

I doubt even a monopoly dispatcher will get all $800 million of the revenue though.

Let's not forget, that revenue doesn't equal the value of a company either. Google's market cap is like $500B and their revenue is in the $70B range.

Investors might think they will branch out into deliveries and other stuff like amazon did from books.

That's what Yandex.Taxi (and also Gett) are doing in Russia, contracting cab dispatchers. This way, they hail you a real cab (that, for example, can drive in bus lanes) with your app.

I think they're also trying direct Uber-like scheme but I'm not sure about that.