A Lyft tent for recruiting drivers outside a Jiffy Lube (Smith Collection/Getty Images)

Have gig economy companies ended their money-losing streak?

Lyft and DoorDash just reported their first years with net profits. Instacart is likely next.

2/12/25 1:18PM

For a long time, it was unclear when or whether gig economy companies could actually make money. Not anymore.

After racking up hundreds of millions in losses since going public more than four years ago, DoorDash just reported $123 million of net income for 2024. Lyft, an early entrant to the rideshare scene, also just eked out a $23 million profit, its first full year of profitability ever.

Next up is likely Instacart. It has reported three consecutive profitable quarters in 2024 and is set to report its Q4 results on February 25. Analysts polled by FactSet expect the company to report making $419 million of net income in 2024, compared to a $1.6 billion loss in 2023.

Uber — which offers rides and food delivery, making it a common rival of both Lyft and DoorDash — had its first profitable year in 2023. So did Airbnb, the gig economy’s short-term home rental platform.

After years of waiting, the gig economy is finally paying off. The game plan for these companies has essentially been to ride out the pain of high debt and operating costs, sometimes heavily subsidizing operations with discounts, until their platforms become so ubiquitous that the revenue starts to make up for it.

And now it’s happening: consumers spent more than $250 billion on Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash combined in 2024. (The companies’ revenue, of course, is smaller because a chunk of that money goes to the restaurants or the drivers.)

A previous version of this article misstated the year when DoorDash went public.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

2026 World Cup Reverses Seasonal Lull for Sports Betting Apps

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5