I was curious to see if you are right about the stock performance over time. It turns out that the two companies stock traded very similarly until May of this year. After that, Lyft really has had terrible performance relative to Uber:
The problem is the google chart puts the zero line for the two stocks at their IPO date even though they have different IPO dates, as almost any two stocks you choose to compare would. If you're going to compare the two stocks at the same point in time, they should probably be both at zero on the first day when they both have a price, as Yahoo's chart does (switch to 5Y).
I'm scratching my head trying to figure out why Google Finance would graph stocks this way. The only thing I can think is they didn't consider the intersection of "comparing stocks" and "they might have IPOed in the time range".
No, they launched the service, took their promotions and then left to launch newer products for more promotions. No one was left to improve the existing product.
All stocks are somewhat correlated. When the market overall goes up or down, it drags all the stocks along somewhat. When investors get more confident in the market overall, they also get more confident in each individual stock. See this example of Microsoft and Ford[1]. When the companies are so similar like Lyft and Uber, you'll of course get even more correlation. But Lyft and Uber differ beyond just May. Since June 1, Uber is up 16%, and Lyft is down 24%.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LYFT/chart?p=LYFT#eyJpbnRlcn...