Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

In December, Son reached a deal with Khosrowshahi and Uber’s board, in which SoftBank would purchase some 17.5 percent of Uber’s overall shares in what was called a tender offer, a way for outsiders to buy stock from existing shareholders in the company. The SoftBank shares would come from a group of people, including employees who were long waiting to sell but couldn’t due to Kalanick’s restrictions. They would come from investors like Benchmark, First Round, Lowercase, Google Ventures, and other early Uber investors. Most importantly for Son, SoftBank would purchase those shares at a steep discount from Uber’s valuation earlier in the year. Son and Khosrowshahi settled on a purchase price of $33 per share, pegging Uber’s valuation at about $48 billion—a steal for SoftBank. That meant that the scandals of the previous twelve months had knocked about $20 billion off Uber’s private market value. To keep the price propped up on paper, investors did some sleight-of-hand maneuvering. SoftBank would purchase $1.25 billion in additional, newly issued shares at Uber’s previous existing valuation of $68.5 billion. The premise was absurd; the secondary market clearly valued Uber’s shares at far lower than they were before Uber’s 2017 from hell. Yet in the eyes of the market, the maneuver worked; Uber’s valuation would remain at $68.5 billion.