Scott Galloway says he quietly spent $34,000 on Uber without realizing it — and most Americans are making the same mistake

Galloway is a wealthy, professionally skeptical observer of the tech industry who built his career studying how these companies extract value from consumers. Yet, he had no clue just how bad his list of personal subscriptions had spiraled out of control.

That's the point. Big Tech has engineered its products to make spending invisible, frictionless, and self-renewing. Spending $34,000 on Ubers didn't just announce itself. It accumulated, ride by ride, on autopilot.

And if it can happen to someone whose entire career involves around dissecting these business models, it can surely happen to anyone.

The numbers say it's already happening to most people

According to a CNET survey (2), about 80% of U.S. adults paid for at least one subscription between April 2024 and April 2025, spending an average of $1,080 per year, with $204 of that going toward services they no longer use or had forgotten about entirely.

A big part of the problem is at the free trial level. CNET notes how nearly half of consumers have signed up for at least one free trial and then forgotten or neglected to cancel before being billed.

The system, Galloway argues, is built to keep charging until you actively stop it (3). He estimates that just 5% of visitors canceling two subscriptions each would erase over $288 million in market capitalization (4). That illustrates how small individual decisions scale into real financial pressure on these companies.

The companies Galloway specifically called out — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Paramount+, Meta, Uber, Netflix, OpenAI and X — have collectively built billing architectures specifically engineered to minimize the friction of spending and maximize the friction of stopping (5).

The market cap math that reframes small charges

Galloway's campaign introduced a calculation that reframes what a "small" monthly subscription actually costs. A single canceled ChatGPT subscription at $240 a year equates (at a 40x revenue multiple) to lost market capitalization of about $10,000, as reported by Adweek (6).

That reframe matters for consumer psychology and is entirely separate from any political motivation. A $20 monthly charge may not sound like much. But annualized and multiplied by the revenue multiples Wall Street applies to subscription businesses, it represents a meaningful ongoing financial commitment — one many people never consciously made.

Running the audit

The practical lesson from Galloway's own inventory says it all. He found duplicate services he'd forgotten about. He found subscriptions tied to devices he no longer owned. He found convenience spending that had never once been consciously budgeted.

The financial audit most people haven't run starts with these four categories: streaming and entertainment, AI and software tools, delivery and ride-sharing, and cloud storage.