Lyft warns it may never make any money.
“We have a history of net losses and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future,” reads the second risk in Lyft’s March 1 prospectus for an initial public offering.
In other words, Lyft has never made any money, and can’t promise that it ever will.
Despite booking $2.2 billion worth of revenue on $8.1 billion worth of rides and other sales in 2018, Lyft also lost $911 million. That was up from 2017, when it recorded a net loss of $688 million, and from 2016, when its net loss came to $683 million. Adding that all up gives you a net loss of $2.3 billion over the past three years. That’s a lot of money!
Of course, losing money is fashionable in Silicon Valley, where investor subsidies are king and startups that bleed cash to acquire users reassure themselves that they’ll “make it up later in
