How come some group of hacker Uber drivers hasn’t disintermediated Uber?

Because there's way more to Uber than an app.

There's so many facets I don't know where to start

- Background Checks

- Payment Infrastructure

- Insurance, and not some off-the-shelf insurance, complicated messy layers insurance

- UX

- Expensive marketing and subsidies (which is what creates trust in brand so we all feel comfortable hopping into cars with strangers)

- Local laws (even if they break a lot of them, they do still follow some)

There's an open source Uber-like platform: https://libretaxi.org/

But making an Uber app is easy, making an Uber platform is expensive.

> could be paying themselves instead of the owners investors

Uber isn’t “paying the owners [sic] investors,” it’s (still) consuming huge amounts of their capital. From https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det... :

“As such, we are improving our full year Adjusted EBITDA guidance by $250 million to a loss of $2.8-2.9 billion”