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Comment by chinesegoldfarm | Hacker News Reader

legit/dumb question. Math does not add for me on the '$82.4B valuation', they are selling 180 millon shares at $45 which is $8.1B what is the remaining 82.4b - 8.1b = 74.3b value come from????? it said: "Uber had raised $28.5 billion as a private company from no less than 166 different backers, with its last valuation in the region of $75 billion. The $82.4 billion valuation that it finally settled on for the IPO (selling 180 million shares at $45/share)" So it means that when they raised the 28.5b privately it went to 75b valuation???? please explain, thanks in advance...

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The market cap (valuation) is the value of one share times the number of outstanding shares (those part of the IPO but also all the existing ones). $8B is the amount of capital raised during the IPO.

but when you buy a share, you are part of only the 8B thats being raised with the other 180 million shares, or do you have a small part of the whole 80~b valuation?

There are 80 billion dollars worth of shares that exist. However only 8 billion of those shares were released for the public markets. The remaining 72 billion dollars worth of shares are held outside of the public markets (insiders, vcs, the company itself, etc.)

Till such time those 72b shares do not become public, are these technically still referred to as options? Also, for ex-uber employees who still own shares, how does one restrict them to not sell those in the public market assuming they are part of the 72b or will they only be part of the 8b?

No, options are not the same as shares. Options are a contract that allows you to buy or sell shares at a certain price.

The employees are part of the 72 billion. All employees (current or ex) have a lock up period after the IPO where they are not allowed to sell.

thanks for your time and explanation!

Those 180m shares would represent ~10% of the company. The rest are either locked up and are not allowed to be sold by employees or certain investors for a certain period* or are held by the IPOing company itself to sell off at a later date, depending on demand.

* This is common in IPOs or other events (eg leading up to earnings announcements). The thinking is that if everybody dumped the stock at once, it'd depress the price. It's also common to prevent insider trading. There are a lot of employees who are probably waiting nervously for the blackout period to expire.

is there a website or something to know how many shares does all major companies, appl, googl, amzn offer to the public market? thanks!

Any stock research platform will tell you shares outstanding ( https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBER/key-statistics?p=UBER ), but it’s otherwise as easy as dividing the market cap by the current stock price.

but again, market cap is the full value of public shares available, how can we now that only 10% of uber's shares are public and 90% privately? or how can we know how many public shares does apple offer and how many are private?

No, market cap is all shares, including ones held privately.

They're not listing all ownership of the company on the exchange, only a piece of it. There's still other, non-publicly-traded ownership valued at the rest of the 72 billion.

That's understandable, but for the average non-professional buyer, it's not fair to sell the idea of a '80b company', because it's only that 10% that you guys are saying. thanks for your response!

how much it raised against only matter to figure out how much the VC will pay for the shares. by your numbers, it appear that uber convinced investors to pay $30b for 24% of the company. which now, might only be worth $8b... (taking all numbers from your comment)

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