"And how much is [Uber, Inc.] the company actually worth? They’ve got an answer for that and it’s not an inspiring one: “Our historical net tangible book value as of December 31, 2018 was $(7,620) million or $(0.02) per share.”
Net tangible book value consists of the real assets of a company — its physical properties, like buildings and equipment — less its debts. By this valuation, Uber is $7.6 billion in the red. (Parentheses are how you do negative numbers in financial statements.)
Traditional investors looked for stocks with a low ratio of market price to book value; the legendary Benjamin Graham thought you should never buy a stock with a price-to-book ratio of over 1.5. Uber’s is essentially infinite. But that’s old stick-in-the-mud thinking. According to the new thinking, which went out of fashion after the dot-com bubble burst but has since returned, a firm like Uber’s value comes from intangibles, like its intellectual property, its app, its relationships, its reputation."
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