> Amazing to see how efficiently some of the biggest grifters exploited this dynamic to funnel money straight from investors and into their own personal net wor

> Amazing to see how efficiently some of the biggest grifters exploited this dynamic to funnel money straight from investors and into their own personal net worth, while building businesses that couldn't have possibly been profitable. It didn't matter, though, because they needed the sense of scale and growth to continue grifting investors. Matt Levine had a great theory on this. It basically boiled down to: "If I wanted to short the VC market how would I do it?"...and basically point to what Adam Neumann did: I can’t quite say that Neumann improved the allocation of capital, but there are certain parallels. Neumann too … look, here I am speculating, and I don’t mean to speak for Neumann’s subjective experience of his WeWork career, but from the outside, in hindsight, objectively, one could describe it like this: He spotted a bubble in venture-subsidized fast-growing money-losing capital-intensive low-margin tech-adjacent companies, noticed in particular that SoftBank seemed to be on the long side of that bubble, and set himself up to profit on the other side—by raising money for his own ultra-unicorn, by setting up the governance of that unicorn in a maximally self-interested way, and by selling and margining a bunch of his personal shares. 6 When investors like SoftBank were frenziedly buying unicorn stock, he was frenziedly selling it. He set himself up to profit from the collapse of the unicorn bubble, and accelerated that collapse. Lessons were learned, and he taught them. Now he’s rich. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do-you-like-we-now?sref=Mv7iE3iW https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...