For some investors, just being invited to the party is good enough. They don’t need to meet the host.
That’s how it seems at Morgan Stanley, at least. A special fund at Morgan Stanley is offering wealthy clients the chance to invest in the hottest thing ever (a.k.a. Uber), but with one catch: The fund doesn’t provide investors with any details about Uber’s finances, according to the New York Times.
Big institutional investors in Uber receive revenue and expense numbers and projections, but not those in the Morgan Stanley fund, called New Riders L.P. That may in part be because investors in the fund will not directly own Uber equity.
According to the Times, the 290-page Morgan Stanley offering document for the fund warn that the bank “has conducted limited due diligence with respect to the company” and that it has not “independently verified the accuracy or completeness of such information.”
While many so-called Unicorns (private companies valued at more than $1 billion) have begun to crash to earth, and a number of Internet firms that went public are now trading below their IPO price, a select few—i.e. Uber—continue to demand (and get) blind faith from their investors. According to those interviewed by the Times, Uber’s last fundraising round valued it at $62.5 billion.
Or 62½ unicorns.
“Only Uber can do this,” Joshua M. Brown, a financial adviser at Ritholtz Wealth Management, told the Times. “They are the last of the gigantic unicorns that people are clamoring to get into.”
Of course, if Uber goes public at a huge valuation and saves the planet in the process, the New Riders investors with be laughing all the way to the bank. If not, however, we’ll quote a line from a recent Fortune piece about “Silicon Valley’s $585 Billion Problem”: Good luck getting out.
Morgan Stanley declined to comment for this story.
