This is kind of an absurd article. Even assuming that the numbers are right and that Uber managed to get out of most of the shares since they were due to Lewand

This is kind of an absurd article. Even assuming that the numbers are right and that Uber managed to get out of most of the shares since they were due to Lewandowski, and assuming that the value of those shares have dropped (which is NOT how you value a deal- it's valued by the share value at the time, not some random time later). Let's see the opposite side of the coin: Having bought Otto for basically their 90 employees and putting Lewandowski in charge of their entire AD operation what do they have now? Lewandowski is gone, Delaunay is gone. They have a massive law suit on their hands from Google, and the IP is almost certainly unusable or atleast significantly diminished in value. Now their engineering group isn't run by anyone they acquired from Otto, most of the good engineers have moved on and in a competitive environment where time to market is essential this disruption has probably lost them a year of development time relative to their competition. That's not even considering their competition was already way better funded. Their remaining employees are facing down the prospect of their shares dropping in value with no one to sell to and huge taxes from when they vested. This was probably make or break for Uber in the AD space, and it was break. After this, any smart CEO would be looking at trying to get acquired by one of the other AD companies with their key value being the existing user base and supply/demand technology.