'My bad, it was just one zero': Lyft CEO on typo that led to a 60% surge in firm's stock

"My bad", that was Lyft Chief Executive Officer David Risher’s response to the typo that inflated the company’s earnings outlook on Tuesday and sent shares soaring.

“First of all, it’s on me,” Risher told Bloomberg Television, taking the blame for the typo in a company press release Tuesday that erroneously projected a particular measure of earnings margin to expand by an eye-watering 500 basis points. 

(In reality, Lyft expects margins to grow by 50 basis points.) “This was a bad error,” he said, “but it was one zero in a press release.”

The typo, which actually appeared in multiple company documents on Tuesday, helped drive a 67% surge in Lyft’s shares in after-hours trading. The mistake was a serious one, Risher said. 

But it shouldn’t take away from Lyft’s “butt-kicking” financial performance, he said. The company reported that gross bookings had jumped 17% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier to $3.72 billion, surpassing estimates for $3.67 billion.

Risher said his team at Lyft was taking the error very seriously and noted it was corrected “within seconds of finding it.” 

Lyft Chief Financial Officer Erin Brewer just began referring to the company’s outlook for a 50-basis-point expansion in the investors' call. 

It wasn’t until later in the call, when an analyst pointed out the discrepancy, that Brewer acknowledged her outlook was “actually a correction from the press release.”

The company eventually corrected its statement and regulatory filings.