Kevin Hart Passed on Uber Because It Sounded Like “Murderville.” We Did the Math on His $100 Million Regret.

Kevin Hart has made a lot of money telling jokes, but one story he tells about money isn’t really a joke. On his talk show Hart to Heart, the comedian said that Troy Carter, the former Lady Gaga manager turned tech investor, offered him a piece of Uber when it was still a tiny San Francisco startup. Hart said no. The clip is making the rounds again this week after UNILAD Tech resurfaced it on October 30, under a headline saying the stake would be worth $100 million today.

We wanted to know if that number holds up. So we went back to Uber’s funding rounds, ran the math against today’s market cap, and also tracked down the episode, which is older than this week’s coverage makes it look.

“Sounds like murderville to me”

Hart’s account is short and very Kevin Hart. “There’s nothing worse than being pitched something that you just can’t see,” he said. “I had the opportunity to invest in Uber in early stages.”

The pitch, as he recalls it, came from Carter: “Troy Carter tells me, ‘Kev, there’s this thing, man. It’s called Uber. You gotta invest in it… It’s basically like strangers giving people they don’t know rides.'” Hart’s reply: “I was like, ‘Sounds like murderville to me’.”

Then the number. “I think Troy may have asked me for $50,000 to $75,000, and that would’ve been $100 million,” Hart said. “To this day I think about it.” He also joked, according to coverage of the episode, that he kind of avoids running into Carter now.

The context makes it better. Hart’s guest that day was Mark Cuban, and Cuban had his own Uber story. Travis Kalanick came to him around 2009 looking for $250,000 at a $10 million valuation. Cuban said he’d do it at $5 million. Kalanick never called back. CNBC estimated at the time that the stake would have been worth about $2.3 billion. So two very rich men sat across from each other and compared which Uber miss hurt more.

Troy Carter actually did invest

Carter isn’t a random friend with a hot tip. After he and Lady Gaga parted ways, he moved into angel investing, and Uber was one of his first bets, Marketplace reported in 2015. He had his own doubts at first. Carter told Marketplace he initially thought it was “the dumbest idea ever” and grilled Kalanick about whether Uber planned to buy all those black cars.

In a Hollywood Reporter guest column, Carter wrote that Kalanick sold him on Uber becoming a global logistics platform, not just a car service. And during his 2015 guest spot on Shark Tank, he told a founder: “I invested in Uber in 2011, when it was only in San Francisco,” per Yahoo TV. The investment ran through his Atom Factory operation, which also backed Spotify, Dropbox and Lyft. Carter has never publicly said how much he put in, and we couldn’t find a reliable figure.

How Uber’s value climbed

Uber has been valued at wildly different numbers over 15 years. Here are the rounds we could verify with reputable reporting.

One correction to this week’s coverage: UNILAD Tech cites CompaniesMarketCap valuing Uber at about $93.74 billion. That figure dates to 2023, when the clip first circulated. As of October 30, 2026, StockAnalysis puts Uber at $133.28 billion and CompaniesMarketCap shows roughly $133 billion to $134 billion. That’s higher than the old figure, even though the stock is down this year.

Would $75,000 really be $100 million?

It depends almost entirely on which round Hart would have joined and how much his slice got watered down afterward. Carter says he invested in 2011, a year with two very different prices: $60 million in February and roughly $330 million in December.

The simple version: $50,000 at a $60 million post-money valuation buys about 0.083% of the company. $75,000 buys 0.125%. Apply those percentages to a $133 billion company and you get about $111 million and $167 million. That’s a 2,200x return.

Real life is messier. Uber raised billions in later rounds and gave out huge amounts of stock to employees, and every new share shrinks an early investor’s percentage. Benchmark is a useful reality check here. It led the Series A and added more money later, yet held about 150 million shares, or roughly 11% of Uber, at the IPO, Quartz reported. Those shares would be worth close to $10 billion at today’s price of about $66, which is life-changing but a smaller slice than a $60 million entry implies on paper. We don’t know Uber’s exact dilution, so the chart below uses an illustrative 50% haircut, clearly labeled as an assumption.

So Hart’s $100 million sits inside the plausible range, but only if he’d gotten in at the earliest 2011 price and Uber’s later fundraising hadn’t eaten much of his stake. At the IPO’s $82.4 billion valuation, an undiluted Series A check of $50,000 to $75,000 would have been about $69 million to $103 million. That’s probably where his number came from.

The celebrities who said yes

Hart’s regret stands out because plenty of his peers made the call he didn’t. Ashton Kutcher and his business partner Guy Oseary put $500,000 into Uber in 2011, and Forbes later estimated the stake was worth about 100 times that within five years, according to reporting compiled by Yahoo ahead of the IPO. Kutcher also got into Airbnb early.

Jay-Z bought into Uber too. In its 2019 profile naming him hip-hop’s first billionaire, Forbes estimated his Uber stake at about $70 million on a $2 million investment made in 2013, Complex reported.

Hart isn’t alone in the regret column, either. Lance Bass told the Daily Beast in 2021 that Britney Spears was one of Uber’s early investors and urged him to get in. He passed, and said he’s “definitely kicking myself,” per Business Insider.

Hart didn’t stay out of startups

The missed Uber check didn’t scare Hart away from tech. He runs his own venture firm, HartBeat Ventures, which got its first major institutional backing from J.P. Morgan in 2022, Black Enterprise reported. Reported early bets include Snackpass, Ready Player Me and Cleancut. In other words, these days he’s the one sitting through pitches that sound like murderville.

Where Uber stands now

Uber is a very different company from the one Carter pitched. It now generates more than $10 billion in trailing free cash flow, but the stock hit a 52-week low near $65 on October 28, about 35% below its high, as investors worry that robotaxis could undercut its core business, Stocktwits reported. Management says autonomous rides are still under 0.5% of trips. Uber reports third-quarter results on November 4.

That robotaxi fear isn’t abstract. We’ve compared whether Waymo is actually cheaper than Uber, and Tesla is pushing its own Cybercab launch in Austin. “Strangers giving people rides” might eventually mean no stranger in the car at all.

Sources and further reading

• UNILAD Tech: Kevin Hart turned down Uber investment worth $100 million today
• Rotten Tomatoes: Hart to Heart, season 3 episode list
• CNBC: Mark Cuban passed on an early Uber investment
• Marketplace: Atom Factory’s Troy Carter, “Music sells everything but music”
• The Hollywood Reporter: Music mogul Troy Carter, why I invested in Uber
• Yahoo TV: Shark Tank sneak peek with Uber investor Troy Carter
• Fortune: The venture firms celebrating Uber’s $17B valuation
• TechCrunch: Uber raises $1.2 billion at a $17 billion valuation
• Fortune: Uber’s valuation hits about $51 billion
• CNBC: Uber prices IPO at $45 per share
• Quartz: The biggest winners and losers from Uber’s IPO
• StockAnalysis: Uber market cap
• CompaniesMarketCap: Uber market capitalization
• Stocktwits via TradingView: Uber stock hits fresh 52-week low ahead of earnings
• Complex: Jay-Z becomes first billionaire rapper
• Business Insider: Lance Bass says Britney Spears was an early Uber backer
• Black Enterprise: Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Ventures gets investment from J.P. Morgan

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