Is It Finally Time to Buy Uber Stock?

Shares of Uber Technologies (NYSE: UBER) jumped about 8% on Wednesday following the ride-hailing giant's first-quarter results. The stock has had a rough run in 2026, trading well below its October 2025 high. But the latest earnings report, featuring accelerating mobility gross bookings growth and a 44% jump in non-GAAP (adjusted) earnings per share, reignited the bull case.

Even better, second-quarter guidance points to gross bookings growth of 18% to 22% year over year on a constant-currency basis. That's a robust pace for a company already operating at enormous scale.

So, with shares well off their highs and the underlying business looking like it can do no wrong, is it time to buy?

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Impressive business momentum

Uber's first-quarter revenue rose 14% year over year to more than $13 billion. But its underlying business momentum is actually stronger than this, as an accounting change to certain business models trimmed reported revenue growth by about 9 percentage points.

A better read on demand is gross bookings, which climbed 25% (21% on a constant-currency basis) to $53.7 billion. This marks the third consecutive quarter of gross bookings growth above 21% on a constant-currency basis -- an impressive achievement for a company that already booked $193.5 billion across 2025. And growth was driven by more than one part of Uber's business. Mobility's (ride sharing) growth rate accelerated, and delivery grew 23% on a constant-currency gross bookings basis. Further, freight returned to growth for the first time in nearly two years.

Additionally, Uber's profitability is scaling faster than the top line. Its adjusted operating income rose 42% year over year to $1.9 billion, and adjusted earnings per share jumped 44%. And free cash flow of $2.3 billion in a single quarter highlights just how cash-generative the platform has become.

Uber's membership program is becoming a bigger part of the story, too. The company crossed 50 million Uber One members in April, with members now driving half of mobility and delivery gross bookings.

There may also be a meaningful tailwind that hasn't fully shown up yet. Insurance costs in U.S. mobility are finally turning lower, and Uber is reinvesting those savings into pricing.

"This will be the first year since COVID where we expect to see good leverage on our insurance cost line for the U.S. mobility business," chief financial officer Balaji Krishnamurthy said during Uber's first-quarter earnings call.

A capital-light autonomy strategy

The bigger long-term debate, of course, continues to center on autonomous vehicles. And here, the first-quarter update offered both encouragement and a reminder of what could go wrong.

Autonomous mobility trips on the platform grew more than tenfold year over year. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber expects to be live with autonomous vehicles in up to 15 cities by year-end, with roughly half of those international. The strategy is to stay capital-light. Rather than building its own self-driving stack, the company is integrating partners such as Alphabet's Waymo, Amazon's Zoox, Wayve, Waabi, Pony, WeRide, and Baidu onto its app, while selling tools like custom insurance and fleet operations to those partners through a new Uber Autonomous Solutions offering.

For now, autonomous ride-sharing competition has not visibly dented the core business.

"And then if you look at kind of markets where Waymo has been launching [...] our category position in San Francisco and L.A. is higher today than it was 6 months ago," Khosrowshahi said on the first-quarter earnings call. He also pushed back on a winner-take-all framing, calling autonomous mobility "another $1 trillion [total addressable market]."

Even so, the autonomous picture isn't all rosy.

Earlier this year, Tesla announced plans for an aggressive expansion of its own Robotaxi service to seven additional U.S. cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, and Las Vegas. Tesla, by contrast, owns both the vehicle and the software in its Robotaxi push while also building out the network in-house. That vertical integration could pressure Uber's economics over time if Tesla's service scales rapidly. And Uber's near-total dependence on third parties for autonomous hardware and software cuts both ways. It keeps capital outlays low, but it tethers Uber's autonomous future to the timelines, safety records, and commercial willingness of its partners.

With a forward price-to-earnings ratio of about 22, Uber stock looks reasonably priced for a business growing gross bookings above 20% and producing nearly $10 billion in annual free cash flow. And after a roughly 25% pullback from last year's high, the risk-reward seems more attractive than it has in some time.

But this is also a high-risk stock. The shift from human-driven to autonomous ride-hailing is still in early innings, and Uber's capital-light approach could prove either brilliant or fragile, depending on how partners and competitors evolve. Investors buying today are accepting genuine uncertainty about how the next several years play out.

Daniel Sparks has clients with positions in Tesla. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Baidu, Tesla, and Uber Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.