closing September, Uber’s top executives had been pitched through a number of Wall road’s biggest banks, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

The bankers’ presentations calculated Uber’s valuation nearly identically, hovering round one particular variety: $120 billion.

That was the figure the bankers stated they could persuade buyers Uber changed into really worth while it listed its stocks on the inventory market, in accordance to three human beings with information of the talks. Uber’s chief government, Dara Khosrowshahi, and chief financial officer, Nelson Chai, listened and discussed the presentations, these human beings stated. Then they employed Morgan Stanley as lead underwriter, together with Goldman Sachs and others, to take the company public — and to effectively make the $one hundred twenty billion valuation a truth.

nine months later, Uber is worth about half of that determine. The experience-hailing firm went public final week at $45 a share and has when you consider that dropped to round $forty one, pegging Uber’s marketplace capitalization at $69 billion — and formally crowning it as the stock market debut that lost extra in greenback terms than every other American preliminary public offering seeing that 1975.

How Uber’s presenting turned into what a few are actually overtly calling a “train wreck” began with the $a hundred and twenty billion quantity that the bankers floated. The determine leaked final year, whipping up a frenzy over how Ondemand Taxi App like Uber should quickly grow to be the largest American agency to list on an American stock trade — larger even than fb, which went public in 2012 at a whopping $104 billion valuation.

but for Mr. Khosrowshahi and Mr. Chai, the $one hundred twenty billion variety turned Uber’s I.P.O. procedure into an workout in dealing with expectancies. a few big buyers who already owned Uber shares at inexpensive prices pushed back against buying extra of the inventory at the sort of lofty quantity, stated humans acquainted with the problem. Their urge for food for Uber turned into dampened further by using the enterprise’s deep losses and slowing increase in areas like Latin the us. And Uber had to cope with unexpected elements, such as fraying exchange talks with China that spooked the stock marketplace inside the equal week that the business enterprise decided to head public.

The result has created a host of pointed questions for all involved in Uber’s I.P.O., from Mr. Khosrowshahi and Mr. Chai to the underwriters at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and bank of the usa. at the same time as Uber raised $eight.1 billion from its supplying and reaped billions of dollars in returns for its early buyers and founders, what ought to had been a climactic second for a transportation colossus alternatively became a humiliation.

The quantity of the fallout may not be clean for a while, and it’s miles too early to judge how Uber will ultimately fare inside the public markets. however as many other tech-associated businesses intention to head public this 12 months, together with the meals-shipping organisation Postmates and the actual-estate company WeWork, they may must deal with whether Uber has squelched what had been a pink-hot I.P.O. marketplace.