The robots are coming for everyone's jobs — including, apparently, Uber drivers. Waymo is expanding. Tesla Robotaxi is looming. The bears have convinced themselves that Uber is simply a dead man walking, a middleman about to be disintermediated out of existence by the autonomous vehicle revolution.
Mango respectfully disagrees — though the question is genuinely hard.
In the massive Claude Code selloff of early 2026 — hitting primarily software but many other sectors perceived to be at risk from AI — there are some opportunities worth sniffing out. Uber strikes Mango as one of them.
The stock has sold off as a perceived victim of the autonomous vehicle wave: Waymo is expanding, Tesla Robotaxi is looming, and the market has decided that Uber drivers are toast and therefore so is Uber. But this logic misses something important. Uber is not just a driver-matching service — it is an aggregator of demand. And their relationships with AV providers are already being built. They could just as easily be a winner from autonomy as a loser.
The most recent quarter made the bull case look pretty good: revenues up 20%, EBITDA up 35%, and enough free cash flow to buy back meaningful amounts of stock. That is not a company in distress. That is a company the market has decided to panic about because the robots are coming.
Mango is working on this idea. More to come.
The WSJ piece makes the argument that Uber's role as a demand aggregator — the thing that actually finds and routes riders — doesn't disappear just because the car drives itself. That's worth taking seriously.
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