Uber quietly loses $3bn as its self-driving car chief jumps ship

Taxi! Five senior Uber staff have now left this year

Uber, the cab company that wants you to think it's a tech firm, has revealed another whopping annual financial loss, but claims that revenues are nevertheless growing fast.

It comes as the company also loses another senior member of staff.

Sherif Marakby was the vice president of ‘global vehicle programs', which includes the self-driving division that has recently come under legal fire from Google for allegedly stealing its ideas.

"Sherif's deep experience and knowledge of the automotive industry have helped us tremendously in working to make self-driving cars a reality," Uber told Techcrunch, when news of the latest executive departure broke.

Marakby is the latest in a long string of recent executive departures, many of whom have lasted almost no time at all with the company. In Marakby's case, just a year. Before Uber, Marakby had worked at Ford for 25 years.

This year has seen its head of Communications, head of AI, vice president of product, and senior vice president of growth all leave, as well as the company president, following bad publicity over a number of issues ranging from abuse of drivers, institutional sexism, and exploiting Trump's travel ban.

But as if all this wasn't enough, the company very quietly announced on Good Friday that its losses for the last year could be approaching $3bn. That's more than the entire GDP of Burundi and about half of founder Travis Kalanick's estimated personal net worth.

The company, which continues to grow, was valued at $62bn in its last funding round. However, it keeps on getting more and more bad press, mostly due to its own stupidity, with Kalanick saying recently, after an altercation with a driver, that he had received "a stark reminder that I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up".

At this point, he agreed to hire a "handler" to help him, prompting CEO Jeff Jones to quit, seeing his role as having been effectively sidelined.

So where does this leave Uber? Has it grown too big to fail or will its investors get cold feet? Many are pinning their hopes on Kalanick's unnamed handler to bring some stability to the increasingly rickety vehicle.

However, if it keeps losing money at its current rate and cannot persuade its backers to stump up more cash it is unlikely that it will last beyond 2020.