“We’re very, very, very different than WeWork,” he said of the company, which ultimately failed to deliver one of tech’s most highly anticipated I.P.O.s of the year and had to be bailed out by SoftBank, the Japanese investment powerhouse that also happens to be a major investor in Uber.

Still, Mr. Khosrowshahi said, he did not believe it was “proper or fair” to judge Masayoshi Son, the chairman and chief executive of SoftBank, for taking a $4.6 billion hit from his investment in WeWork.

“He definitely pushed up valuations” of start-ups, Mr. Khosrowshahi said, but his track record was “going to be determined over a long period of time.” SoftBank — which apart from investing in WeWork and Uber, put $335 million into the work productivity company Slack — reported its first quarterly operating loss in 14 years Wednesday, about $6.5 billion in total.

Mr. Khosrowshahi also defended Uber’s position that it was a tech services company that would not be reclassifying its drivers as employees in light of a recently passed law in California on independent contractors. “Ninety-two percent of our drivers work less than 40 hours a week,” he said. “I think this law is misguided, and we’re going to fight it.”

He argued forcefully that Uber was starting to grow more carefully, in spite of its inherently low-margin business because of its high operating costs. The company did not hesitate to concede defeat in — and pull out of — some of its tougher markets, he said, including China and Southeast Asia. He compared Amazon’s cloud services platform, Amazon Web Services, to Uber’s core ride-hailing business and said these represented the consistent moneymaking assets for Amazon and Uber.