Amazon Could Acquire Lyft This Year

Lyft (NASDAQ:LYFT) could be an attractive acquisition target for Amazon (AMZN), helping the ecommerce giant ramp up its robotaxi business to better compete with Tesla (TSLA) and Alphabet’s (GOOG, GOOGL) Waymo.

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.

Lyft’s ride-hailing network of 24M active riders would be “key” to help Amazon (AMZN) commercialize its own autonomous driving ambitions. And a Lyft-Zoox partnership (which Amazon acquired in 2020), would be an “immediate and credible” threat to Waymo (GOOG, GOOGL), as well as increase the potential for Amazon (AMZN) to expand Zoox to a food-delivery service.

Apple will pay $95 million to people who were spied on by Siri

Apple has agreed to a $95 million settlement with users whose conversations were inadvertently captured by its Siri voice assistant and potentially overheard by human employees. The proposed settlement, reported by Bloomberg, could pay many US-based Apple product owners up to $20 per device for up to five Siri-enabled devices. It still requires approval by a judge.

If approved, the settlement would apply to a subset of US-based people who owned or bought a Siri-enabled iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, MacBook, iMac, HomePod, iPod touch, or Apple TV between September 17th, 2014 and December 31st, 2024. A user would also need to meet one other major criteria: they must swear under oath that they accidentally activated Siri during a conversation intended to be confidential or private. Individual payouts will depend on how many people claim the money, so if you apply, you could end up receiving less than the $20 maximum cap.

US stocks reverse big gains to end lower

US stocks were poised for a solid advance early in the morning, but the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 gave all that up and then some to finish 0.2% lower in the opening session of 2024. The Russell 2000 eked out a small gain.

The Magnificent 7 was mixed, with NvidiaNVDA $137.94 (2.97%) and MetaMETA $598.00 (2.35%) near the top of the S&P 500 leaderboard while TeslaTSLA $381.22 (-6.14%) was at the bottom after its Q4 sales figures missed expectations. The cohort, as a whole, hasn’t had a positive session since before Christmas, the longest such streak since April.

Pot stocks had a hot start to the year, headlined by TilrayTLRY $1.49 (9.40%).

• The debt ceiling is back on the table for 2025.

• Architecting one of the year’s most ambitious films, The Brutalist.

• These restaurant chains closed locations in 2024.

The space economy is expected to be worth $1.8 trillion by 2035.