Stripe: Winning their stripes
Stripe’s valuation has rebounded to a healthy $91.5bn, cementing its position as the world’s largest privately held fintech company — and, by a considerable stretch, as the largest company founded by a pair of affable brothers from Limerick.
The Irish-American payments and billing company dropped in value to a mere $50bn in 2023, but its latest share sale saw it return to form after it processed $1.4-trillion in payments in 2024, up 40% year on year, a number that it says is equivalent to about 1.3% of global GDP.
The share sale allows Stripe’s long-term employees to fill up their piggy banks and reduces the pressure on the Collison brothers to launch an IPO with all the pesky reporting and disclosure that going public would entail.
The bros content themselves with an annual letter to the Stripe community, which mentions the good news that the company was profitable in 2024 and expects to remain so in future. It also provides a fascinating overview of the sector from the Collisons’ unique vantage point at the top of this avalanche of transactions.
Half of the Fortune 100 companies use Stripe, and the revenue that businesses process through it is growing seven times faster than that of all companies in the Fortune 500.
Driven by machine learning and AI, the payments landscape is evolving so rapidly that anybody on a legacy payments platform is at risk, particularly with fraud now estimated to cost 3% of an online business’s revenue — Stripe Radar has reduced illicit card testing on Stripe by more than 80% in the past two years.
Lucid Motors: Burning rubber and cash
From its inception, Lucid was not shy about suggesting that it didn’t just want to build the best electric vehicle, it aspired to build “the best damn car”.
According to an unusually drooling review in no less august an organ than The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), it may well have come close with the $250,500 Air Sapphire, which the WSJ described as “unquestionably one of the finest sedans in history”, awarding the triple-motor 1,234hp version the title of “God’s flyswatter”.
Its 0-100km/h time of 1.9 seconds makes it the fastest production sedan in the world, and this astonishing acceleration is matched only by the speed at which the company is burning cash as it hurtles towards a financial brick wall.
Lucid went public in 2021 and within a year its market capitalisation had hit a decidedly optimistic $60bn as it projected breakeven in 2025 on sales of 135,000 vehicles. Back in the real world, it sold about 10,000 vehicles in 2024 and made a loss of $2.7bn, marginally better than the $2.8bn it lost in 2023.
Fortunately for Lucid it is backed by the exceptionally deep pockets of the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which now owns 60%, and the Saudis have pledged to buy 100,000 of its long-awaited SUVs and midsize sedans, if the company ever manages to get them rolling off the production line.
The Saudis appear to have lost patience and have claimed the head of long-term CEO Peter Rawlinson — fortunately only in the metaphorical sense — and they are searching for a replacement.
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