On Uber's side, they sold at their $45 mark. However, seems this may have been a down round vs their last private funding round ($74.1BN pre-money vs $76BN last year).
It's generally an optics play - how bad would it look if you as a bank, who wanted to continue to offer IPOs, listed a company and its stock price plummeted below IPO on the first day - obviously you didn't do a great job at valuing the company and building an adequate order book.
But let’s also assume some large proportion of players are reactionary, tending to sell when the price drops and buy more when the price rises. If you could show a sufficient demand at price A, then that large block of people would not sell their holdings because the price does not decline beyond A.
Then, the economically rational actors have a dilemma because they believe the price should be B (where B < A), but powerful actors have shown it is unlikely to drop below A for all practical transaction volumes... it may make more sense to treat the true price as A.
I guess what I’m asking is how much money relative to market cap is required to make the market accept an inflated price _without_ actually trading on it and losing money?