Uber’s initial public offering — the biggest in a year of blockbusters — is yet another chance for Uber and its detractors to sell their competing ideas of what this company represents.

As it heads toward a valuation of about $90 billion — nearly the combined value of General Motors and FedEx — Uber is packaging its new image as a socially oriented company led by a contrite chief executive facing an enormous potential market that it has only begun to explore. Skeptics see a company with significant legal exposure, a corrupt culture, declining profitability and slowing growth that has forced it to make an awkward pivot to less attractive businesses such as Uber Eats and Uber Freight.

This clash of visions is why I.P.O.s are so much fun. But the Uber I.P.O. also signifies something deeper about changes in the entrepreneurial world that fuels the global economy. The most amazing part of Uber is not the magnitude of the losses that it has sustained — more than $10 billion in operating losses over the last three years — but that pre-I. P. O. investors have been willing to fund those losses by pouring in capital on an unprecedented scale, in the hope that they will reap the rewards when the stock enters the public markets.

We should all root for a comeuppance for those investors, who have helped to debase the entrepreneurial system that is so important to the global economy. What would that comeuppance look like? It might look something like the performance of Lyft, Uber’s main rival, whose stock price is down 32 percent since it went public on March 29. When Uber’s shares begin trading on Friday, many of the underwriters, institutional investors and other early investors in the company will try to sell their shares. If the price falls immediately after the I.P.O., they will be badly disappointed. Such a “broken” I.P.O. is considered an embarrassment in Silicon Valley, and I.P.O.s are often underpriced to avoid them.