Exactly. Smacking down a rich billionaire who did something dirty is a political win you can present to the voters in NY and recovering money for other billion

Exactly. Smacking down a rich billionaire who did something dirty is a political win you can present to the voters in NY and recovering money for other billionaires who got fleeced is a win you can present to the moneyed elite. Incentive alignments like that are fairly rare. There is nothing to lose here because even if you lose it can become a rallying cry for preventing it in the future. Even if there were no legal basis for the investigation it would likely still happen because it is such a massive political win that even if the AG was too dumb to take it up on their own accord the AG's boss would strongly suggest an investigation be opened. Just to be clean I'm not defending Neuman/WeWork definitely did wrong and I think the statutes around securities fraud are broad enough to nail them, just that the technical legality is a footnote compared to the other motivators here. It should be obvious why this kind of prosecution is a politician's wet dream (and make no mistake, a state AG is a politician, just not an elected one) regardless of whether there's clear law violation or not. Government doesn't swing into action like this because it's morally right or whatever (it may be morally right, but that is tangential). It swings into action because there are stakeholders to please and it's rare to have two big stakeholder groups aligned like this.