Musk's moves, a CEO's plan to cement control, and SoftBank lets loose its LatAm operation

SoftBank is spinning off its SoftBank Latin America Fund months after its biggest advocate, longtime former SoftBank Group International CEO Marcelo Claure, left the company over a dispute about billions in dollars of pay he believed he was owed. Claure reportedly took off with his stake intact in the Latin American fund. (That stake was valued at about $300 million in late January per a WSJ source.)  According to SoftBank, it continues, for now, to be the largest shareholder in the new entity, named Upload Ventures. The firm will continue to be led by the investors who led it previously under the direction of Claure -- Rodrigo Baer and Marco Camhaji -- and it will continue to invest $100 million per year in startups, according to everyone involved, though the overall amount they have to work isn't being disclosed publicly. Certainly, one wonders, as one does, if SoftBank is thumbing its nose at Claure, or whether SoftBank's woes of late are the driving force behind this move, as the Japanese conglomerate is forced to scale back its investments across the board. 

TechCrunch has more here, and here is a chat we had with Claure about investing in Latin America in September of last year. At the time, he told us that SoftBank was on target to invest $8 billion in LatAm as of the end of 2021 and that he expected it would invest another $8 billion to $10 billion in the region this year. Notably, all of that money was off SoftBank's balance sheet. ("It's pretty much our capital," he answered when we'd asked about outside investors.) Assuming SoftBank is scaling way back here, we'll be curious to see if other investors fill that sizable void. Stay tuned?

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Datto, a 15-year-old, disaster recovery service that was acquired by Vista Equity in 2017 for $1.5 billion and taken public in 2020, has just been acquired by Kaseya, a provider of security and management services for internal IT departments and managed servers providers, for $6.2 billion. TechCrunch has more here.

Sonos is spending $100 million to acquire Mayht, a Dutch startup best known for co-creating a Bluetooth speaker powered by light. Mayht specializes in an audio technology called Heartmotion. The company claims to have reinvented the "core of the speaker driver” to allow for speakers that can be up to 10 times more compact than other models without sacrificing sound quality or bass output. And it’s that expertise Sonos is shelling out to own, Engadget has more here.

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Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke wants to cement control over the company, the company unveiled today, via a "proposed update to its governance structure" that would fix Lütke's voting power at 40% of the total, up from 34% currently, by giving him a special class of founder shares with a variable number of votes. In other words, as notes The Information (which doesn't think much of this plan), if his actual shareholding drops, his special class would kick in and top off his vote so it doesn’t decline. The proposal is being packaged with a 10-for-1 stock split.

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