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WeWork and Nikola come to mind. Robinhood depending on if you consider purporting yourself to be “stealing from the rich, giving to the poor - Robinhood”, but y
by edot 5y ago
WeWork and Nikola come to mind. Robinhood depending on if you consider purporting yourself to be “stealing from the rich, giving to the poor - Robinhood”, but you actually take orders from Citadel to be fraud. I think a lot of recent IPOs will turn out to be fraud-lite, in which it is shown over the next decade that these companies were pump and dumps that never actually do anything. They look just good enough to garner investment at IPO for initial investors to cash out.
Most any company with ML or AI in their branding, running stupid amounts of CNBC ads and repeating their AI name 30 times during the ad.
- mrkramer 5y agoWeWork and Theranos were selling hype no real solution or service. They seem like companies from dot com bubble era, I thought tech investors got smarter but they are still as stupid as they were 30 years ago.
- jollybean 5y agoWeWork is different than Theroanos. People actually rented WeWork properties and got a valuable service. The problem was more or less shenanigans on the Exec. side, and unsustainable financial situation. In that case, the 'consumers' actually end up ahead, with a cheaper services than otherwise, then investors lost.
- HWR_14 5y ago>WeWork is different than Theroanos. From my understanding, WeWork was more of a working business that was overvalued and had a lot of self-dealing with the CEO (which I would characterize as embezzling, but may not legally have been.) Theranos invested their money in trying to make an impossible product, lying and failing at it the whole time. But I could be wrong, sensationalist news headlines and such.
- jollybean 5y agoI believe this is correct.
- chmsky00 5y agoWell, yeah… The old political ways are not going anywhere anytime soon. The useful land is politically captured. Hack the planet; have money = untouchable in our society. After biological well-being, there isn’t much economic activity needed to sustain the species. This is why the market went up during the lockdown but do nothing companies worth $75 a year ago are worth <$10 again. At some point it just becomes keeping the simulation alive for the sake of those that benefit most from the simulation; these gods, then this god, then no god, we create value…
- mardifoufs 5y agoWhich investor actually made money from WeWork? If anything it's an example proving the opposite. The founder may have made some money but the investors were left holding the bags. The whole scandal was centered around the size of the investment loss that the main investor, Softbank, had to eat...
- lizdax 5y agoBenchmark did. Invested in the early rounds (starting with Series A of $15m, mentioned in "WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the great Startup Delusion"), mid rounds and the final stake when they were supposed to IPO was $626m -- 40x their initial investment, according to FT[0]. 0. https://www.ft.com/content/d32c8526-f555-11e9-b018-3ef8794b17c6 https://www.ft.com/content/d32c8526-f555-11e9-b018-3ef8794b1...