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This was always the weird thing about WeWork, after the collapse of it's ridiculous valuation people were like "Well, it's still a business, similar to IWG, it

This was always the weird thing about WeWork, after the collapse of it's ridiculous valuation people were like "Well, it's still a business, similar to IWG, it has some value". But the truth is no, the only thing WeWork had was a series of liabilities. They had signed a bunch of agreements to rent office space long term at a high price. The valuable part of IWG is that they have rental agreements with buildings that are low cost and they rent that space out to businesses for more money. That's how they make money. But WeWork didn't have that, at best they had expensive leases they needed to walk away from and some potential customer demand that is elastic enough that it'd go to 0 when they started charging above their own costs. The article makes out like WeWork lost 47Bn over the last 5 years. No! It was probably worth 0 when the first IPO blew up. The only thing that kept it alive was Japanese face saving.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
What is crazy to me is that Adam Neumann came out of this thing about a billion dollars richer. Now he is with Marc Andreessen (another hokey) in Saudi raising more money for the next hot air balloon. What a delightful grift.
- wahnfrieden 3y ago
  He worked hard for it! lmao edit: to be serious... there's certainly a lot of difficulty in achieving what he did no matter the failure, but when we use the word work to compare an employee worker and a ceo owner, let's be more specific with what we mean. we all understand work here and we talk about its structures day in day out. a ceo's day to day work has you running memeified mental contortions to understand how it translates into customer or employee value. their duties have more to do with the operations and growth of a business in a competitive landscape. this isn't "work to produce", it's work to manage and grow an organization's marginal returns and to seek monopolization in market in various ways as far as the law permits. I personally don't have the same casual respect for these two categories of work in terms of their social worth and am skeptical when people talk of them as equally comparable when talking about things like respectability, social good, whose participation is necessary to produce something, etc
  - ninth_ant 3y ago
    A single parent working three jobs just to cover rent and food works hard. Grifting hedge funds maybe isn’t easy, but get no sympathy from me for “working hard.” Lots of people work hard.
    - dazc 3y ago
      'A single parent working three jobs just to cover rent and food works hard.' Is this a reality though? I was desperate for work many years ago and all the part-time jobs were optimized for a specific time of the day - say 10 am to 2pm or thereabouts. I can imagine a scenario where someone is holding down 2 jobs but 3, this is hard to comprehend? For context, I should add I am in the UK where there are perverse incentives to only have one job where you work a maximum of 16 hours because this is where all the work-related benefits (welfare) start to fade away. Not that I was claiming benefits but the 'benefit trap' is where most of the employers set their nets.
      - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
        > Is this a reality though? I was desperate for work many years ago and all the part-time jobs were optimized for a specific time of the day - say 10 am to 2pm or thereabouts. > I can imagine a scenario where someone is holding down 2 jobs but 3, this is hard to comprehend? I only ever had two at a time, but it would have been possible to cobble three together (I effectively did this for a semester as I had two jobs, and was also commuting between two college campuses for classes). I managed 3.5 hours of sleep a night except for the weekend. And got to a point where the third energy drink of the day triggered a feeling of sleepiness. For a person without a credential: Early AM) Newspaper delivery or Load line at UPS/FedEX/DHL. Regular hours) A regular job during the day Evening hours) Unload line for UPS/FedEX/DHL Weekends) Babysitting, or whatever. Sleep) Good luck!
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - wizofaus 3y ago
        > Is this a reality though? Most certainly in the age of the gig economy. Even my own partner has about 4 different jobs now - as a registered nurse. They don't necessarily add up to a massive number of hours a week but she'd no doubt prefer not to have to jump back and forth between so many employers, each with their own set of expectations and management styles etc. But she'd have to settle for a pretty crumby base salary for any sort of full time position.
- whatever1 3y ago
  And praised as a successful entrepreneur!
  - sidewndr46 3y ago
    Depending on your definition of 'success' he may be one of the most successful. After all, he apparently managed to profit off a business that was worth little to nothing.
    - Ekaros 3y ago
      Is success making lot of money for yourself. Or building a business that in general makes money and world a better place. That is generates societal wealth.
      - pessimizer 3y ago
        Personal success. He's certainly done a lot better personally than 99.99999% of people who have created something of value.
      - barelyauser 3y ago
        Success is personal. If your goal is to increase the amount of wealth for everyone then go for it. With that said, remember the following. While the economy is not zero sum and we can increase the amount of wealth in the world, power is zero sum. Power is finite and very scarce. You can create tremendous wealth and later find out it ended in the hand of a single person. And that person is not willing to share.
        TheCleric 3y ago
        So would you have considered Bernie Madoff successful?
        barelyauser 3y ago
        If his goal was to amass personal wealth at the expensive of others. But again, it depends on the person. A cab driver that barely makes ends meet can be successful while a multimillionaire isn't. If you wake up and do what you want to do, you are successful.
- BeFlatXIII 3y ago
  As Maryland state senator Clay Davis used to say, "sheeeeeeeeit, I ain't saying no if someone's just giving money away." Grift those Saudi princes for all you can, king.
  - skywal_l 3y ago
    He also said, "Look up for gullibility in the dictionary, you'll see Masayoshi Son's face smiling back at ya!".
  - adhesive_wombat 3y ago
    It's called Neom/Oxagon and it must be a consultancy feeding frenzy.
  - DANmode 3y ago
    Are you a golf fan, by chance?
  - draw_down 3y ago
    [dead]
- xenospn 3y ago
  If he can keep getting billionaires to give him billions of dollars, I don’t see anything wrong with that. They’re supposed to be professionals.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    If we've learned anything from SVB, the crypto craze, how the rich somehow keep falling for ponzi scams, and all the weirdly unsound startups, it's that these deep pocket people are terribly, remarkably, average and their status comes from things unrelated to their merit or prowess. I don't know why this is shocking. Money is a social construct so its allocation is also socially constructed. It is results oriented, but it's a more complicated kind of result than investment ROI. For instance, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio were paid more for their flopped tenure at Apple than I could ever hope to make. Gil walked away with nearly 8 million his final year after overseeing 708 million in loses. Good gig. Almost every c-level exec I've met at $1 billion+ firms leaves me with the same impression: "a charismatic overconfident idiot" If you want to do things that require capital, knowing how this stuff actually works is required.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    I doubt those billionaires give only their own money. (But well, that puts the real problem elsewhere. I have no issue with that either, up to the point where the company was put on the stock market, then I have issues.)
bombcar 3y ago
The other secret is the vast majority of their revenue is not “co-working” but just people and companies doing long-term leases on small offices. Which means there’s not as much buy long sell short as you’d expect, because they’re just competing directly with other leasers.
RC_ITR 3y ago
WeWork at it's core was a bet that 'if we lock in 30-year mortgages at market rates, office rent inflation will mean that in 2045, we will have significant cost advantages.' You can argue the pandemic merely accelerated remote work, so it was always probably a bad bet.
somberi 3y ago
SilverBirch - You may be correct, and I agree with your point about IWG is a genuine business. However, it also is worth pointing out that their stock has been the lowest it has been over the past 5 years (I believe 5 years is a fair window that overlaps with WeWork). Stock price: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWG.L/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWG.L/

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

What is crazy to me is that Adam Neumann came out of this thing about a billion dollars richer. Now he is with Marc Andreessen (another hokey) in Saudi raising more money for the next hot air balloon. What a delightful grift.

wahnfrieden 3y ago
He worked hard for it! lmao edit: to be serious... there's certainly a lot of difficulty in achieving what he did no matter the failure, but when we use the word work to compare an employee worker and a ceo owner, let's be more specific with what we mean. we all understand work here and we talk about its structures day in day out. a ceo's day to day work has you running memeified mental contortions to understand how it translates into customer or employee value. their duties have more to do with the operations and growth of a business in a competitive landscape. this isn't "work to produce", it's work to manage and grow an organization's marginal returns and to seek monopolization in market in various ways as far as the law permits. I personally don't have the same casual respect for these two categories of work in terms of their social worth and am skeptical when people talk of them as equally comparable when talking about things like respectability, social good, whose participation is necessary to produce something, etc
- ninth_ant 3y ago
  A single parent working three jobs just to cover rent and food works hard. Grifting hedge funds maybe isn’t easy, but get no sympathy from me for “working hard.” Lots of people work hard.
  - dazc 3y ago
    'A single parent working three jobs just to cover rent and food works hard.' Is this a reality though? I was desperate for work many years ago and all the part-time jobs were optimized for a specific time of the day - say 10 am to 2pm or thereabouts. I can imagine a scenario where someone is holding down 2 jobs but 3, this is hard to comprehend? For context, I should add I am in the UK where there are perverse incentives to only have one job where you work a maximum of 16 hours because this is where all the work-related benefits (welfare) start to fade away. Not that I was claiming benefits but the 'benefit trap' is where most of the employers set their nets.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      > Is this a reality though? I was desperate for work many years ago and all the part-time jobs were optimized for a specific time of the day - say 10 am to 2pm or thereabouts. > I can imagine a scenario where someone is holding down 2 jobs but 3, this is hard to comprehend? I only ever had two at a time, but it would have been possible to cobble three together (I effectively did this for a semester as I had two jobs, and was also commuting between two college campuses for classes). I managed 3.5 hours of sleep a night except for the weekend. And got to a point where the third energy drink of the day triggered a feeling of sleepiness. For a person without a credential: Early AM) Newspaper delivery or Load line at UPS/FedEX/DHL. Regular hours) A regular job during the day Evening hours) Unload line for UPS/FedEX/DHL Weekends) Babysitting, or whatever. Sleep) Good luck!
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - wizofaus 3y ago
      > Is this a reality though? Most certainly in the age of the gig economy. Even my own partner has about 4 different jobs now - as a registered nurse. They don't necessarily add up to a massive number of hours a week but she'd no doubt prefer not to have to jump back and forth between so many employers, each with their own set of expectations and management styles etc. But she'd have to settle for a pretty crumby base salary for any sort of full time position.
whatever1 3y ago
And praised as a successful entrepreneur!
- sidewndr46 3y ago
  Depending on your definition of 'success' he may be one of the most successful. After all, he apparently managed to profit off a business that was worth little to nothing.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    Is success making lot of money for yourself. Or building a business that in general makes money and world a better place. That is generates societal wealth.
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      Personal success. He's certainly done a lot better personally than 99.99999% of people who have created something of value.
    - barelyauser 3y ago
      Success is personal. If your goal is to increase the amount of wealth for everyone then go for it. With that said, remember the following. While the economy is not zero sum and we can increase the amount of wealth in the world, power is zero sum. Power is finite and very scarce. You can create tremendous wealth and later find out it ended in the hand of a single person. And that person is not willing to share.
      - TheCleric 3y ago
        So would you have considered Bernie Madoff successful?
        barelyauser 3y ago
        If his goal was to amass personal wealth at the expensive of others. But again, it depends on the person. A cab driver that barely makes ends meet can be successful while a multimillionaire isn't. If you wake up and do what you want to do, you are successful.
BeFlatXIII 3y ago
As Maryland state senator Clay Davis used to say, "sheeeeeeeeit, I ain't saying no if someone's just giving money away." Grift those Saudi princes for all you can, king.
- skywal_l 3y ago
  He also said, "Look up for gullibility in the dictionary, you'll see Masayoshi Son's face smiling back at ya!".
- adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  It's called Neom/Oxagon and it must be a consultancy feeding frenzy.
- DANmode 3y ago
  Are you a golf fan, by chance?
- draw_down 3y ago
  [dead]
xenospn 3y ago
If he can keep getting billionaires to give him billions of dollars, I don’t see anything wrong with that. They’re supposed to be professionals.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  If we've learned anything from SVB, the crypto craze, how the rich somehow keep falling for ponzi scams, and all the weirdly unsound startups, it's that these deep pocket people are terribly, remarkably, average and their status comes from things unrelated to their merit or prowess. I don't know why this is shocking. Money is a social construct so its allocation is also socially constructed. It is results oriented, but it's a more complicated kind of result than investment ROI. For instance, Michael Spindler and Gil Amelio were paid more for their flopped tenure at Apple than I could ever hope to make. Gil walked away with nearly 8 million his final year after overseeing 708 million in loses. Good gig. Almost every c-level exec I've met at $1 billion+ firms leaves me with the same impression: "a charismatic overconfident idiot" If you want to do things that require capital, knowing how this stuff actually works is required.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  I doubt those billionaires give only their own money. (But well, that puts the real problem elsewhere. I have no issue with that either, up to the point where the company was put on the stock market, then I have issues.)

bombcar 3y ago

The other secret is the vast majority of their revenue is not “co-working” but just people and companies doing long-term leases on small offices. Which means there’s not as much buy long sell short as you’d expect, because they’re just competing directly with other leasers.

RC_ITR 3y ago

WeWork at it's core was a bet that 'if we lock in 30-year mortgages at market rates, office rent inflation will mean that in 2045, we will have significant cost advantages.' You can argue the pandemic merely accelerated remote work, so it was always probably a bad bet.

somberi 3y ago

SilverBirch - You may be correct, and I agree with your point about IWG is a genuine business. However, it also is worth pointing out that their stock has been the lowest it has been over the past 5 years (I believe 5 years is a fair window that overlaps with WeWork). Stock price: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWG.L/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWG.L/