Billionaire investor Carl Icahn was not really involved in the uneven first days of ride-sharing and tech company Lyft going public, and that was because he reportedly sold off the 2.7 percent stake he had in Lyft. While Lyft and Uber had been expected for some time now to go public, one of the bigger questions has always been how these companies, whose investors have effectively been subsidizing rides at a loss, will start turning a profit.
Reports do not disclose how much Icahn could have made from selling his stake, but the bigger picture is that Icahn, a famous investor, saw the temporary liquidation of assets to be more worthwhile than a long-term investment in a company that is supposedly part of the transportation future.
The company did start off with something to cheer about, and maybe Icahn had some moments of pause as he saw the stock go up to a high of 21 percent of the IPO price. Since that high last Friday, the company’s stock price has not done much.
Icahn originally got involved with Lyft when he purchased $100 million worth of Lyft shares in 2015, according to the New York Post. The Wall Street Journal suggests that his stake would be worth about $550 million with Lyft just at the IPO price of $72 a share.
Jonathan Christodoro, a former managing director of Icahn Capital LP who was on Lyft’s board until last month, connected Icahn with Soros, which was worth about $550 million at the IPO price, according to the WSJ report.
It was not clear what price Soros paid for the stake, the WSJ said.
According to a report on the New York Business Journal web site, Lyft went public at a price of $72 a share, which valued the company at $24 billion. Shares rose as high as $88.60, but since then they’ve fallen.
Lyft co-founders John Zimmer and Logan Green rang the Nasdaq opening bell remotely last Friday from a downtown Los Angeles warehouse in a ceremony attended by Lyft drivers, employees and their families, according to the NYBJ report.
Icahn didn’t give a reason for his sale of his Lyft stake but was reportedly unhappy that Zimmer and Green were given super-voting shares that gave them outsized voting power at the company.
Icahn had Christodoro sitting on the Lyft board as his representative, but Christodoro left the board last month and Icahn declined to replace him on the board. Christodoro has a $900,000 stake in the company, the Journal reported, and he attended the Lyft IPO ceremony in Los Angeles.
“We’re just at the beginning of moving from a world based on car ownership to a world based on transportation as a service built around people. After more than one billion rides, we’re able to look forward to a world we’ve long imagined,” Zimmer and Green said at the IPO event in Los Angeles, adding “we’re just getting started on how we’ll continue to invest in our local communities.”
