Is Uber the Amazon — or the Enron — of the transportation industry?

Uber has been promoting itself in its pre-IPO roadshow as the “Amazon of transportation,” but the comparison is misleading. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is cleverly positioning his company so that it appears as more than just a taxi-like ride-hailing business, highlighting itself as an online platform that can connect users to a number of transportation-related side businesses. “Cars are to us what books were to Amazon,” says Khosrowshahi. This is part of Uber’s sales pitch for why it is different from its competitor Lyft, which has seen its stock plummet since its IPO as analysts start reasonably questioning how the money-losing ride-hailing business can ever be profitable.

But if we look more granularly at Uber’s side businesses, there’s not a whole lot there to suggest that those will ever be any more profitable than its taxi business. Those businesses are operating in industries either with low profit margins, heavy competition, immature, unpredictable markets, constraints on widespread product adoption, or wholly dependent on technology that is not even close to being ready. Let’s take a closer look at each of these side businesses:

Uber Eats. This is its food delivery business which Uber has heavily promoted in its IPO pitch. But the bottom line is that you can only squeeze so much profit from delivering…