Things aren't going so well for Uber these days. California wants the company to stop testing its self-driving vehicles without the state's permission, and on Monday Bloomberg reported that the company lost $800 million in Q3 2016 on revenues of $1.7 billion. To make things worse, that number doesn't include anything the company lost in China, a market in which Uber has been spending heavily of late. All told, the poster child for "disruption" looks set to lose more than $3 billion this year.

We imagine this news will engender much Schadenfreude. Just this year the company settled a lawsuit with drivers from Massachusetts and California, settled a second lawsuit from customers alleging sexual assault by their drivers, settled a third lawsuit over misleading claims about background checks for drivers, lost a legal battle in the UK to prevent its drivers from being classified as employees, got fined by the French courts for operating an illegal taxi service, and told California where it could stick its self-driving permits. It even hired people to pretend to be journalists to aid another lawsuit.

But if regulations and laws are there for the company to ignore, so too it seems are basic economic principles like "turning a profit." Despite plenty of criticism that it pays drivers too little, it also evidently isn't charging its customers enough. 2016's losses may well wipe out almost all of the gigantic cash injection Uber received from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund back in June.

Meanwhile, Uber faces ever more competition, not only from Lyft but also GM's Maven. The ride-sharing space is only getting more crowded as car manufacturers fall over each other to grab a slice of the "mobility" market.