Uber posts massive $5.2 billion quarterly loss

Uber just had a really, really, really bad quarter.

On Thursday, the ride hailing company posted both its biggest quarterly loss and its slowest-ever revenue growth. This was Uber's first finance report since it went public in May with a dismal IPO, and is attributing $3.9 of the $5.2 billion loss to all the stock-based compensation it had to pay out to employees when it went public, The New York Times reports.

Uber started sharing its financial data — albeit very little of it — in 2017, and posted an overall loss of $878 million in Q2 of last year. That's about half of the $1.3 billion it lost this quarter when you don't count the stock payments. Still, Uber's adjusted loss turned out to be $656 million, less than the $979.1 analysts predicted, per Bloomberg. The company also did report a revenue jump to $3.1 billion, a 14% gain from a year ago. Its adjusted revenue ended up being below analysts' estimates.

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Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told reporters that he expected 2019 to be a "peak investment year," and that losses would slow in "2020, 2021." But Uber didn't provide any forecasts in its report, or provide noteworthy explanations for staffing cuts it announced this week.