🚕 Private AI burrito taxis

Okay, Uber might have been a “little bit of a crapshoot” for riders looking to book a robotaxi, per Waymo’s co-CEO. Yes, notching just four ride bookings via AI agents during the Halloween period probably wasn’t the spooky season performance it had hoped for. And alright, the company’s president defecting to OpenAI might have added to what hasn’t, on the surface, been a great news week for Uber. 

Park all of that for just a minute, however, and some of the numbers out of Uber’s third-quarter report earlier this week must still have been enough for execs still at the company to cheer at least a little.

Although revaluing equity investments weighed on earnings to the point of missing, Uber revenues rose 9.6% from last year to hit $14.77 billion and beat estimates. Trips taken on Uber — that is, slightly confusingly, the sum of trips taken in Uber cars and total deliveries made on Uber Eats — hit a staggering 4.06 billion in the quarter.

That tally means that each of Uber’s 215 million monthly active platform users must have ordered a taxi, or a taxi for their burrito, just shy of 19 times (more than six times each month) on average last quarter. Imagine how many more the company could’ve clocked without the driver shortages in India, Canada, and Brazil that it also disclosed this quarter.

For those of you who see that trip figure and still assume Uber mostly functions as a ride-hailing service, the company’s split on gross bookings, which rose 20% from last year to reach almost $60 billion in the third quarter, might not be what you expect… and the balance might not have been how you thought for a while now. 

Since Delivery gross bookings value overtook Mobility during the pandemic era — remember? Not many of us were taking taxis and a lot of us were getting stuff delivered because there was nothing else to do? — there’s really not been a huge margin separating the two in either direction. In the last quarter, Uber booked $29.5 billion from rides and just around $1 billion less from its Delivery segment; its Freight division, which brought in $1.8 billion, still clearly has a ways to go.

THE TAKEAWAY

While some of the more eye-catching Uber news this week might not have looked great on paper, the billions of trips and hundreds of millions of riders and users that the company notches each quarter undoubtedly softened the blow. And those figures could be about to get roaring again, thanks to a just-announced deal between Amazon and Uber Eats.

— Thomas Jones

• 🏈CFB: This weekend features an absolutely massive slate of college football games between highly-ranked opponents, games that will have huge implications for the playoffs. These include #1 Miami at #11 Notre Dame (ND favored at 72%), #2 Georgia at #10 Ole Miss (Georgia favored at 63%), #9 BYU at #3 Utah (Utah favored at 63%), and #5 Alabama at #14 LSU (the Tigers favored at 68%)

• 🏈NFL: Week 9 of the NFL season is underway, with games including Green Bay at New England (the Pats a 61% favorite) and the ascendant and glorious New York Giants taking on the humbled and one might even say doomed Philadelphia Eagles (I’m not biased, New York’s the 63% favorite) as well as a Sunday Night game where Tampa Bay takes on Chicago in a contest with big NFC implications, and the Bears are favored with 73%. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC, ForecastEX, LLC or Rothera Exchange and Clearing LLC.

According to the latest price figures from HackTheMenu, that’s roughly how many Baconators you could have bought with the $1.4 billion takeover bid that Wendy’s rejected yesterday from an investor group led by Nelson Peltz’s Trian Partners. 

• Premarket earnings due out from Moderna, Oklo, and Terawulf.

• October non-farm payrolls report slated for release at 8:30 a.m. ET.