4 ms·

It is pretty interesting watching Neumann get demonized in realtime. It's not like he broke into people's homes and stole a billion dollars. Softbank gave it to

• wpietri 7y ago
  Do the math on how many seed and A rounds that could have been funded with what he burned. That certainly gets me mad, all those entrepreneurs who didn't get a shot.
  • draw_down 7y ago
    I guess, if one also considers any dollar spent unwisely as a lost donation to charity.
  • redisman 7y ago
    I agree that putting that money into seed funds would be the most widely beneficial but the Vision Fund seems to be the opposite of that.
  • InvisibleCities 7y ago
    Fuck seed rounds. How many homeless people could be given shelter with that money? How many starving people could have been fed? How many people who died needlessly because they were unable to afford medical treatment could have lived if this money had been given to them instead? There is a tremendous moral rot at the core of American capitalism, and the story of We is exhibit A.
    • perl4ever 7y ago
      The wealth that was being destroyed from the perspective of society, or the starving, is the losses of WeWork day by day and year by year. I think it's important not to confuse that with the wealth that was merely transferred from one book entry to another. The spectacular destruction of the abstract entity ensures that the slow bleeding doesn't go on. Like, if I have $1B, which is really just a note in a computer and you steal it from me by hacking that computer, or playing a confidence game, that's not the same as if a billion dollar factory burns down.
      • JohnFen 7y ago
        > you steal it from me by hacking that computer, or playing a confidence game, that's not the same as if a billion dollar factory burns down. I honestly don't follow this logic. What is the essential difference?
        • perl4ever 7y ago
          The difference between kicking a stuffed toy and a live pet?
          • JohnFen 7y ago
            I don't see how that's an apt analogy at all. Both of the circumstances you cite appear to be the same fundamental thing to me -- they're both live pets, just of different breeds.
            • perl4ever 7y ago
              Money in an account is just a note that someone is entitled to actual resources at some indefinite time in the future. You don't see a difference between erasing that note and destroying the resources it quantifies? I mean, I'm not saying that what people write down can't affect the real world, but it's a fundamentally different thing from the physical world. Erasing a number could have any positive or negative consequence, maybe soon, maybe far in the future. It's very tenuous. Destroying the stuff has a specific cost, for certain, that applies to society and not just the owner. Destroying or wasting stuff in large amounts is obviously "stealing" from the needy, while numbers changing because of people having their hopes and dreams deflated is not. When hopes and dreams die, the cost or benefit depends entirely on how it motivates humans, which is very complex and often unpredictable, but can as easily be good as bad, even if it's painful. Perhaps I am talking to a being from another dimension, or a ghost who exists only on the internet, in which case I'm probably wasting electrons. How about this: Suppose you have a lottery ticket, and you think you've won $1M. But then you notice that you read a number wrong, and it's actually worthless. You may feel like you've lost $1M, but actually you just gained something extremely valuable - if you continued thinking you'd won, you might have done something destructive like quit your job before you found out you didn't. And that action in the real world, would have had negative consequences for you, your employer, your loved ones, and so on. Society in other words. For some reason, even (or maybe particularly) people who think money is evil fall into the trap of thinking it's real as...(google says "a donut").
    • wpietri 7y ago
      Oh, absolutely. But even in the capitalist context, this was a giant mess.
  • brohee 7y ago
    The subsidized office space was making some people seed round last longer though. WeWork tenants were also winners.
• Itaxpica 7y ago
  Yeah, I'd view Neumann a lot less negatively if it hadn't been for all the job losses. Someone getting paid a billion dollars to set ten billion dollars of Softbank's money on fire is hilarious in a vacuum, but someone getting paid a billion dollars when a thousand+ people are gonna get laid off and it's largely his fault, way less so.
  • ars 7y ago
    It's also his fault they were hired in the first place. Don't forget to also blame him for giving them jobs (at least for a while).