SoftBank Will Take Out Some Uber Cash
Also blockchain efficiency, crypto order flow and lunch valuation.
A pretty normal thing to do, if you are a venture capital fund, is to invest in a private tech startup, watch it grow and go public, cash out the investment by selling your shares to the public (either in the initial public offering, or a few months later), and return the cash to your investors. That is basically what SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund is doing with its Uber Technologies Inc. investment, except that it’s SoftBank, so it’s doing it in a slightly weird way:
Sure, why not. SoftBank owns about 13% of Uber, worth about $8.9 billion, plus about $2.1 billion of Guardant and perhaps another billion dollars’ worth of Slack. If you put up $12 billion worth of stuff as collateral for a $4 billion loan, then it’s a pretty safe loan. Your banks will probably get paid back. If all the stuff loses 50% of its value, a fairly catastrophic drop, there's still more than enough stuff left to pay back the loan. Also, because it seems to be a non-recourse loan,1 if the stock loses 100% of its value then you can still keep the $4 billion.