I want to add another note: there's no evidence for this piece's assertion that they knew self driving wouldn't work out. There are still many large companies i

I want to add another note: there's no evidence for this piece's assertion that they knew self driving wouldn't work out. There are still many large companies investing in this area - Waymo, Cruze, Tesla etc. The fact that Uber's program clearly failed in retrospect doesn't mean that it was a scam. You can even look at Lyft, which was doing a similar program, as evidence that there were several companies with similar ideas to create a robo taxi fleet, all of whom did some analysis that showed it could be possible. With that said, if someone had magically made me CEO of Uber at that time, I would have immediately scrapped their self driving program and just tried to negotiate an exclusive licensing deals with someone like Waymo who seemed to be farther ahead.