Why not kill Uber off question
It is not at all clear that Waymo's settlement was too small. Nobody is anywhere close to deploying a self-driving "ride share" vehicle, and progress toward that has stalled.
Thus the economic impact of "self driving" in general cannot be said to be great at this moment.
Furthermore, the Waymo tech was a dead end. Yes, a dead end is useful still to understand what not to do, but a dead end toward a still non-functional tech simply isn't worth a lot.
Ultimately the greatest pain to Uber was the original Otto purchase of $680m. The stock then was "cheaper" than now, so that payout plus the settlement represents a huge loss for Uber - particularly since it clearly did not benefit Uber materially except perhaps the engineers acqui-hired. Even then, the court costs to date likely nullified that benefit.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
