Tech

Benchmark has dropped its lawsuit against Travis Kalanick and can never sue him over this issue again

uber travis KALANICK
Travis Kalanick Flickr/LeWeb13
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  • Benchmark officially dropped its lawsuit against Travis Kalanick on Thursday.
  • Dropping this suit was part of the deal that sold 15% of Uber to SoftBank.
  • The suit was dropped "with prejudice" meaning that Benchmark can never decide to sue Kalanick over this issue again.
  • It's a relatively happy ending between the two estranged Uber board members.


As promised and expected, Uber investor Benchmark has officially dropped its lawsuit against Uber board member and former CEO Travis Kalanick.

The suit, filed in August, accused Kalanick of fraud and attempted to wrestle away two board seats from Kalanick's control as well as get Kalanick removed from the board, himself.

The suit was dropped on Thursday "with prejudice" meaning that a plaintiff – in this case Benchmark – cannot refile the suit at a later date and can never sue again over the same issue.

The lawsuit was dropped in conjunction with a massive financing deal Uber recently closed with Softbank. Softbank bought about 15% of the company, mostly from existing shareholders including Kalanick and Benchmark. The stipulations of that deal included a number of changes to how Uber's board operates. These changes included eliminating shares with extra voting rights, vastly increasing the size of the board, and subjecting the two board seats controlled by Kalanick to approval by the entire board of directors.

By dropping the lawsuit, Benchmark has also dropped its formal attempt to get Kalanick kicked off the board.

But Benchmark achieved it's goal of limiting Kalanick's power with the Softbank deal.

Meanwhile, Kalanick is taking a victory lap, too. The lawsuit against him is over. And he's achieved his goal of bringing Softbank in as a major investor, preventing a potential alliance between Softbank and Lyft, Uber's main competitor in the US.

And for the first time, Kalanick sold off small chunk of his Uber shares. He retains about a 7% stake and pocketed $1.4 billion cash from the shares he sold in the Softbank deal.

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Julie Bort was Business Insider's Editor at Large for the Tech team. She loves investigating stories and shedding light on the tech industry's most amazing people.Here's a small sample of some of Julie's work.Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'Sex, tequila, and a tiger: Employees inside Adam Neumann's WeWork talk about the nonstop party to attain a $100 billion dream and the messy reality that tanked itInsiders say WeWork's IT is a patchwork of cheap devices and Band-Aid fixes that will take millions to fixWeWork's toxic phone booths were created in-house by its Powered by We business70-hour weeks and 'WTF' emails: 42 employees reveal the frenzy of working at Tesla under the 'cult' of Elon MuskElon Musk works so many hours at Tesla, employees are constantly finding him asleep under tables and desksHow this woman went from a Pizza Hut employee to a founder of a $4 billion startupAn Oracle insider explains how some salespeople gamed the system to sell more cloudTHE TAKEDOWN OF TRAVIS KALANICK: The untold story of Uber's infighting, backstabbing, and multimillion-dollar exit packagesMicrosoft is in talks to buy GitHub, a startup at the center of the software world last valued at $2 billionThe alarming inside story of a failed Google acquisition, and an employee who was hospitalizedInside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT marketHow a registered sex offender wound up living in an Airbnb hosting unsuspecting guestsA controversial ex-banker is the person who really runs Twitter — and he's gambling the company's future on one risky betSecret passages and skipped meals: Oracle's CEO gave us a rare peek at what it really takes to run a $37 billion companyHP told some employees to choose between becoming contractors with no benefits or being fired without severance'I felt like we were being extorted': Customer says Oracle tried to strong-arm him into a cloud saleHow the queen of Silicon Valley is helping Google go after Amazon's most profitable businessAirbnb host: A guest is squatting in my condo and I can't get him to leaveLIES, BOOZE, AND BILLIONS: How one of the fastest-growing startups in Silicon Valley history raised $580 million then spiraled out of controlGitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and employees depart — and we have the full inside storyWhen she's not writing for Business Insider, Julie can usually be found on the trails, on my mountain bike, or on my skis, if you know where to look.