Dan Primack: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Yeah. There’s no way to ascertain what the price should be because there’s only one party that can, is willing to, and keep buying. It’s wild. And then the final piece is we kept saying that they bought a company, except they say they didn’t. They have a majority stake in the company, but they claim they will not control the votes on the board. The way they say they get to that is they are going to significantly expand the board. But when you ask them, “Okay, what’s the size of the board? Most importantly, who’s going to appoint those new board members?” there are no answers. When you ask the internal official spokesperson for WeWork, you ask her that, she said to me yesterday, “Call SoftBank.” I said, “Why would I call SoftBank if SoftBank’s not the one who’s controlling this?” “Call SoftBank. ” When you call SoftBank, I don’t know if we haven’t determined or no comment, but for whatever reason they’re claiming they’re not controlling this. They’re in-charge. They should be. They own most of the company, they own most of the shares, and whether or not most of those board members are salaried SoftBank employees or not, they’re going to be beholden to SoftBank or in some way related to them. This is the last piece, which conveniently is acquisition category on this show. Why is SoftBank doing this? Here’s my thoughts. I think there are two reasons. One, I can’t remember where I read, but I think to come up with this idea is CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US. SoftBank is, of course, a foreign entity. They’re a Japanese company. Now, they will be buying control of the US company. They had issues with CFIUS in the past, so this just short-circuits that. That could be a risk to the deal, say, “Oh, we don’t actually own it, so we don’t have to go through CFIUS.”…

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