Highlights for this morning: Lyft under pressure, ByteDance makes AI chip, Musk's associates walked away from him

The gold price is consolidating above the $5,000 mark amid weak U.S. data and expectations of a Fed rate cut. Lyft shares fell more than 17% after weak earnings and a cautious outlook, with the company betting on robotaxis and new services. Several co-founders left Elon Musk's xAI company. These and other topics - in our review of key events by the morning of February 11.

Lyft shares fell 17% in extended trading after the release of quarterly reports and forecast for 2026 worse than Wall Street estimates, reports Business Insider. Fourth-quarter revenue rose 3% to $1.59 billion on a forecast of $1.76 billion. In addition, Lyft reported an unexpected operating loss for 2025 of $188.4 million. The company's first-quarter adjusted EBITDA guidance was $120-140 million, which was also worse than analysts' estimates. Pressure on the results came from aggressive price action by competitors, said Lyft CEO David Richert.

The company is continuing its relaunch strategy: it's developing premium Black rides, a service for teens and a partnership with Waymo to launch robotaxis in Nashville, the publication noted. However, Richer acknowledged that there are simply not enough players right now that can provide enough robotaxis to operate at Lyft's scale. Notable growth in robotaxi offerings is expected closer to 2030, he said.

Two co-founders - Jimmy Ba and Tony Wu - have left Elon Musk's company xAI in two days, CNBC reports. Earlier, Igor Babushkin, Kyle Kosich and Christian Szegedy left the project, while Greg Young announced a pause in work for health reasons. This coincided with the preparation of SpaceX for IPO and merger with xAI in a stock deal: SpaceX was valued at $1 trillion, xAI - in $250 billion, the channel notes, citing documents with which it was familiarized.

At the same time, xAI is facing scrutiny in the US, Europe and Asia over the operation of a chatbot called Grok, which allowed the creation and distribution of explicit dipfakes based on photos of real people, including minors.

The company did not promptly comment to CNBC.

The Hong Kong Monetary Regulator (HKMA) intends to approve the first wave of licenses to issuers of stablecoins in March - 36 applications are now being considered, CNBC writes. The law requires licensing of companies issuing tokens pegged to the Hong Kong dollar. Authorities cite cross-border payments and tokenized bank deposits as key scenarios. Potential issuers say that steblecoins will enable international transfers faster than traditional banking channels, speed up refunds, and make exchange rates more transparent through blockchain settlement.

At the same time, Beijing, which has a complete ban on crypto-operations since 2021, fears weakening control over cash flows, strengthening the role of dollar-stablecoins (USDT, USDC) and the use of such instruments in illegal schemes, the channel points out. Experts considered Hong Kong's initiative to be a limited and cautious experiment rather than a change in China's general stance on cryptocurrencies, CNBC points out.

China's ByteDance, owner of TikTok, is developing its own chip for AI inference tasks and is discussing its production with Samsung Electronics, Reuters has learned. The company expects to have the first samples by the end of March and produce at least 100,000 chips this year, with a possible increase to 350,000, according to the agency's sources. The talks also concern access to scarce memory needed for AI infrastructure. ByteDance said the information was "inaccurate", Samsung did not comment.

The project, codenamed SeedChip, is part of the Chinese company's large-scale AI strategy. In 2026, ByteDance plans to spend more than 160 billion yuan ($22 billion) on AI investments, more than half on Nvidia chips, as well as on the development of its own solutions.

The price of gold rose moderately and is consolidating above $5000 per ounce after weak data on retail sales in the U.S., Bloomberg reports. Yields of 10-year government bonds fell to the minimum for almost a month, the dollar weakened against the currencies of the largest developed countries (the so-called "Big Ten", including the euro, yen and pound) - this strengthened expectations of a possible reduction in the Fed rate, which supports the metal that does not yield interest income, the agency points out.

Earlier, gold updated the record, rising to $5595 on the background of geopolitical tensions and fears for the independence of the Fed, but then the price collapsed by 13% in two sessions due to overheated speculative positions. Now the metal has recovered about half of the losses and is trading around $5045. A number of banks maintain a bullish outlook, including BNP Paribas, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.

- The Tokyo Stock Exchange is closed on February 11 due to the holiday.

- Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index was up 0.3 percent, while mainland China's CSI 300 Index was down 0.11 percent.

- In South Korea, the Kospi index rose 1%, while the Kosdaq was almost unchanged.

- Australia's S&P/ASX 200 added 1.7%.

- Futures on the S&P 500, Nasdaq Composite and Dow Jones Industrial Average were up about 0.2 percent.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor