Uber is sitting on steep paper losses on its $500 million investment in Lucid Motors, as the EV maker’s stock reached on early Thursday a new record low at $4.47 — equivalent to $0.447 on a pre-reverse split basis.
By mid-April, the ride hailing giant held 37.75 million Lucid shares acquired through two separate transactions over the past year.
As shares of the Saudi-backed brand closed at $4.70 on Wednesday, the stake was worth approximately $177.4 million — 64.52% below Uber‘s total $500 million investment.
The first tranche was announced in July 2025 and officialized in September, when Uber purchased 13.7 million shares for $300 million, implying a cost basis of roughly $21.87 per share.
At Wednesday’s close, those shares were worth about $64.5 million — representing a loss of approximately 78.5%.
Uber announced a second tranche last April, acquiring roughly 24 million shares for $200 million, or about $8.32 per share.
The latest stake is currently valued at approximately $113 million, down about 43.5%.
The Original Deal
Uber first announced its investment in Lucid on July 17, 2025, as the ride-hailing company, the EV maker and autonomous driving startup Nuro unveiled a three-way robotaxi partnership.
Under the deal, Uber committed $300 million in equity and separately agreed to purchase at least 20,000 Lucid Gravity SUVs over six years — for deployment on its platform with Nuro‘s Level 4 autonomous driving system.
Lucid shares surged 36% on the announcement, reaching an intraday high of $36.90 on a split-adjusted basis — a level that remained the stock’s 52-week high for nearly a year.
Uber routed its investment through its subsidiary SMB Holding Corporation, with the share price set using the arithmetic average of the daily volume-weighted average price over the 30 trading days prior to signing.
The deal closed in early September, giving Uber 13,715,121 Class A common shares.
Within two weeks of the announcement, however, the entire rally had been erased.
Concerns over a simultaneously announced 1-for-10 reverse stock split, a lack of pricing details on the vehicle purchase agreement and the limited nature of Lucid‘s role in the partnership quickly soured sentiment.
Uber’s Position
Uber first disclosed its Lucid stake in a Q3 2025 13F-HR filing in November, reporting the 13,715,121 shares at a value of $326.3 million as of September 30.
By mid-November, that position had already dropped to $194.8 million based on a $14.20 share price — a 40% decline in value over six weeks.
A February SEC filing showed Uber closed 2025 with the same 13.7 million-share position, having made no changes during the fourth quarter.
As of December 31, the stake was valued at $145 million — down 55.6% from the end of Q3.
By March 31, 2026 — the latest quarter-end for which institutional filings reflect Uber‘s pre-expansion position — those same 13.7 million shares carried a value of $130.7 million.
As of Wednesday, the original position alone stood at approximately $64.5 million, an 80% decline from September 30.
The Deal Expands
On March 12, Lucid management told investors at the company’s debut Investor Day that an expansion of the Uber partnership was “only days or weeks” away from being finalized.
Uber‘s President and Chief Operating Officer (COO) Andrew Macdonald confirmed at the event that the two companies were finalizing an agreement to deploy Lucid‘s upcoming midsize platform alongside the Gravity.
The expansion arrived on April 14 — two months later — when Lucid announced that Uber had raised its vehicle purchase commitment to at least 35,000 units — a 75% increase — and invested an additional $200 million in equity.
The ride-hailing company purchased approximately 24 million new shares through SMB Holding Corporation at an implied price of roughly $8.32 per share, bringing its total position to 37,753,583 shares.
Uber disclosed the expanded stake in a Schedule 13G filing on April 21, signed by CFO Balaji Krishnamurthy.
The 37.75 million shares represented 11.52% of Lucid‘s Class A common stock, making Uber the automaker’s second-largest institutional investor behind Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF).
Lucid shares surged as much as 13% on the filing-related news.
Still, the ride-hailing company still carried a paper loss of roughly $215 million on its combined investment even after the rebound.
Shares Continue Plunging
Lucid‘s stock has been in a sustained decline since the Uber–Nuro partnership was first announced a year ago.
Shares closed at $4.70 on Wednesday, — down approximately 76% over the past twelve months and more than 99% from its peak at $580.50 in early 2021.
Year to date, the stock has fallen roughly 56% from its January 2 opening price of $10.73.
The 52-week range now spans from $4.47 — a new low reached in early trading on Thursday — to $33.70.
The decline has been particularly punishing since Lucid executed its 1-for-10 reverse stock split in September 2025.
Shares traded in the $2.00 to $3.00 range on a pre-split basis at the time — equivalent to $20.00 to $30.00 after the adjustment.
Last year, former interim CEO Marc Winterhoff dismissed suggestions that the split was motivated by delisting fears, telling Bloomberg that the company was “nowhere close” to breaching Nasdaq‘s $1.00 minimum bid threshold.
Instead, Winterhoff framed the split as a measure to broaden Lucid’s institutional investor base, explaining that certain institutional funds face restrictions on holding securities trading below $5.00 per share.
The stock has now breached that very threshold. Since September 2, shares have dropped by more than 73%.
Lucid‘s market capitalization stood at approximately $1.8 billion as of Wednesday — roughly a fifth of what the PIF has invested in the company across seven distinct funding phases since 2018.
Uber’s Autonomous Push
The Lucid investment sits within Uber’s broader autonomous vehicle strategy, which now spans more than $10 billion in commitments.
The figure includes over $2.5 billion in equity stakes and more than $7.5 billion earmarked for robotaxi fleet purchases — exceeding Uber‘s $9.8 billion in free cash flow last year and representing roughly 7% of the company’s approximately $150 billion market capitalization.
CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has framed the aggressive dealmaking as an insurance policy against disruption.
“We are putting our capital up in order to guarantee supply [of robotaxis] going forward,” the chief executive told investors in February.
Uber has committed close to $500 million in Nuro, Reuters reported last week, citing two sources directly aware of the matter.
The figure — which had not been previously disclosed — reveals the full scale of Uber‘s financial ties to the autonomy startup that supplies the Level 4 driving system for the Lucid robotaxi program.
Nuro first confirmed Uber‘s participation as part of a $203 million funding round raised in August 2025 that also included Nvidia.
In April, Uber added Hertz subsidiary Oro Mobility as fleet manager for the Lucid–Nuro robotaxi program, which remains on track to launch commercially in the San Francisco Bay Area later this year.
The commercial Lucid–Nuro robotaxi service is expected to begin operations in late 2026, with Nuro recently securing driverless testing permits from the California DMV for the Lucid Gravity platform.
In March, Uber agreed to invest up to $1.25 billion in Lucid’s rival Rivian through 2031, with the two companies planning to deploy up to 50,000 R2 SUVs as robotaxis across 25 cities.
A comparison of the two deals showed Uber using an identical financial template — equity investment routed through SMB Holding Corporation, tied to vehicle purchase commitments — while making fundamentally different bets on autonomy.
Lucid‘s program relies on Nuro‘s third-party Level 4 system, while Rivian is developing its autonomous driving stack in-house.
