Uber's $1.3 Million Medallion Strategy Backfires Twice

Uber is pushing regulators to slow down autonomous vehicle adoption—protecting consumers from monopoly control, or so the argument goes.

The actual effect gives Uber more time to catch up to Waymo and Aurora. Are years ahead in the technology. This is not a contradiction Uber is trying to hide.

In 2010, taxi medallion holders in New York and San Francisco ran this same playbook. They had spent decades accumulating medallions that functioned like government-issued wealth transfers—a medallion that cost $500 in 1970 sold for $1. 3 million by 2013.

They succeeded in delaying serious disruption by three to five years. Then the regulation failed anyway, the medallion market collapsed, and Uber won completely. The mechanism is always the same. When a technology threatens your revenue model, you don't argue against the technology. Instead, you argue for managed adoption. You conjure harms that only slowness can prevent, becoming the advocate for caution while your competitors scale enough to absorb the delays you create.

Uber is betting that nobody will notice it's using the exact playbook that failed before.

What's different this time is that Uber lost the original argument by winning it. It proved the medallion strategy doesn't work and that regulators can't actually protect incumbents against better technology. Now Uber is betting that nobody—not regulators, not the public, not venture capitalists funding its competitors—will notice it's using the exact playbook that failed before. The person paying is the consumer, who doesn't get better service for three to five years.

Watch whether the second use of a failed strategy works better than the first. It almost never does. But this time we get to watch whether the people who deployed the tactic ten years ago have learned anything. Usually, that's the real test of whether someone understood what happened, or just understood how to win.