Sources: SoftBank discussed deal with Benchmark to buy Uber shares from existing shareholders at $40B-$45B valuation, and invest an additional $1B at $70B
Three weeks ago, Benchmark partners Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton flew into Sun Valley, Idaho for a private meeting with Masayoshi Son of SoftBank … Tweets: @cityofthetown , @mikeisaac , and @jessicalessin Tweets: Tom Dotan / @cityofthetown : Softbank maybe investing in Uber is the latest thing stressing out the board. Also this is a horrible idea. https://www.theinformation.com/ ... pic.twitter.com/jI1O0Dyz58 @mikeisaac : good additional deets on the SoftBank thing from the information. q: why do a secondary before you even pick a CEO? http://www.theinformation.com/ ... Jessica Lessin / @jessicalessin : SoftBank had been proposing an Uber secondary at $45B. Not likely to happen. Here's why. http://www.theinformation.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Sun Valley meeting between Benchmark partners Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton and Masayoshi Son formalizes what Bloomberg reported weeks earlier: Benchmark initiated the effort to sell stock before the CEO's ouster, seeking an exit for early shareholders in a company without a permanent chief executive. The proposed structure is telling — existing holders would sell at a $40B-$45B valuation while SoftBank injects $1B of new money at $70B, a two-tier deal that prices the secondary far below the last round.
That gap is the real story: it turns Uber's paper valuation into a live negotiation, with the board reportedly stressed by the prospect of a major new shareholder arriving mid-crisis. The deal's fate now hinges on whether Benchmark actually sells — a question the reporting itself flags as open.
First-order effects
- Early Uber shareholders gain a concrete liquidity path at a steep discount to the $70B mark, forcing every holder to decide whether to take a marked-down exit or hold through leadership turmoil.
- Uber's board must weigh a ~$10B-scale SoftBank investment while simultaneously running a CEO search, with the two-track pricing ($40B-$45B secondary vs. $70B primary) becoming the reference point for internal valuation fights.
Second-order effects
- If Benchmark sells even partially, other early investors face pressure to follow into the tender, deepening the discount and resetting Uber's effective private valuation well below its last round.
- A large SoftBank stake would give Masayoshi Son leverage over board composition and strategy at exactly the moment Uber is weakest — competitors like Lyft would read any governance shift as a signal about how aggressively SoftBank-backed capital will be deployed in ride-hailing.
Third-order effects
- The two-tier structure — cheap secondaries paired with full-price primaries — points to a template where late-stage investors buy control of troubled unicorns by exploiting the gap between paper valuations and what insiders will actually accept in cash.
- If this pattern holds across the cohort of high-valuation startups that raised in 2014-2015, secondary discounts become the market's honest price discovery mechanism, and boards lose the ability to defend headline valuations against tender-offer reality.
The trend: Late-stage startup ownership is consolidating around a few mega-investors who use discounted secondaries to convert founder-era paper valuations into priced control positions.