Predictions 2025: Amazon Will Buy Lyft
Adding the ride-hailing company could be a way for Amazon to gas up its robotaxi project.
Robotaxis are quickly gaining ground, largely thanks to Alphabet-backed Waymo, which announced in October that it was completing more than 100,000 paid rides for passengers per week. Waymo plans to enter new regions next year. And everything in the market is sure to intensify further as Tesla tries to begin mass-producing its own robotaxis in 2026.
Existing ride-hailing services are in for a period of disruption. Uber is one of those companies, and to give the company credit, it has been preparing for a future full of autonomous cabs. Uber’s chief competitor, Lyft, is in a far sorrier state, which makes it a ripe acquisition target, and I think Amazon will buy it.
This piece is part of our annual Predictions package. Here’s another educated guess we made—this one about Elon Musk and TikTok—and here’s how our predictions about 2024 fared.
What ails Lyft? It remains a distant No. 2 to Uber, and I was intrigued to see some numbers from third-party data provider Yipit that Andreessen Horowitz’s Alex Immerman recently shared on X: The figures show Waymo’s quick growth in San Francisco in recent months and suggest it now has the same market share as Lyft in terms of gross bookings. (Lyft CEO David Risher later disputed those conclusions.)
Uber has inked partnerships with firms such as Waymo to make robotaxis available on its app. That should help Uber capture a slice of the growing demand for self-driving taxis and insulate itself from losing market share. Lyft has tried to make inroads into autonomous driving too but with less success than Uber. It had struck a partnership with Argo AI—investing in the autonomous-driving startup in the hopes of incorporating its technology into Lyft’s business—but then Argo shut down in 2022. And then last May, Motional, another autonomous-driving startup, said it was pausing robotaxi deployments with both Lyft and Uber as it culled its workforce.
So Lyft could certainly benefit an acquirer with deep pockets, but what would Amazon get from Lyft? The size of Lyft’s existing ride-hailing network—it had 24 million active riders in the third quarter of 2024—could be key to helping Amazon commercialize its own autonomous vehicles.
Back in 2020, Amazon bought its own autonomous-driving startup, Zoox, for over $1 billion. The company has been testing Zoox vehicles in several major U.S. cities and has said it soon plans to offer its first rides to the general public. Amazon acquiring Lyft would make the Zoox robotaxis an immediate and credible threat to Waymo, and it’s easy to picture a world where Amazon expands Zoox—similar to how Uber has added Uber Eats—with autonomous Amazon vehicles whizzing around and dropping off food. (The future really looks Jetsonian when you imagine how Amazon could take what it learns from the combined Lyft and Zoox businesses and apply it en masse to a whole fleet of autonomous vehicles.)
Lyft’s total enterprise value of just under $5 billion would make it an attractively priced target for Amazon, which ended September with over $75 billion in cash on its balance sheet. True, it could also make an offer in stock and take advantage of an almost 50% increase in Amazon shares in 2024. Even better, Lyft is now generating cash—$243 million in the third quarter.
Oh, did I mention that Lyft CEO David Risher has a history with Amazon? He was one of Jeff Bezos’ earliest employees. That would make an Amazon purchase of Lyft a homecoming of sorts. Ahhh, if only all taxi journeys could end so smoothly.