Althouse: "What do you do if you are a Japanese conglomerate whose investment fund entrusted billions of dollars to a grandiose-bordering-on-shady entrepreneur, only to watch said entrepreneur..."

October 26, 2019

"What do you do if you are a Japanese conglomerate whose investment fund entrusted billions of dollars to a grandiose-bordering-on-shady entrepreneur, only to watch said entrepreneur..."

"A. Burn through that entire pile of cash while... B. Yammering about running for 'president of the world,' before... C. Attempting to bill the company $6 million for the use of the word 'We' in its name, and all the while... D. Selling or borrowing against his own shares in the company to buy five mansions and a private jet? If you’re SoftBank, you throw billions more at WeWork, presumably hoping that a sudden torrent of cash will extinguish this monetary bonfire. Also, you pay the entrepreneur, Adam Neumann, more than $1 billion to stop tossing matches at your money and go away."

Megan McArdle explains why "The WeWork story is so bizarre we can’t even get outraged about it."

Okay, then, I will laugh and move on.

32 comments:

Leland said...: There seems to be plenty to get outraged, but we are WaPo and we endorse billions being wasted by government all the time.; 10/26/19, 8:13 AM
Lucid-Ideas said...: Such small potatoes honestly. You could tell this guy was such a huge fraud from far it took all the fun out of it.

Now Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos...there was a fraud we could be proud of!; 10/26/19, 8:25 AM
Tank said...: Why isn't that guy sharing a jail cell with Hillary?; 10/26/19, 8:27 AM
Fernandinande said...: Adam Neumann

What, WeWorky?; 10/26/19, 8:27 AM
Lucid-Ideas said...: #wedontwork
#wefail
#weflop
#webail
#wefraud
#wesad; 10/26/19, 8:31 AM
rehajm said...: I still struggle understanding what their business model was supposed to be. Build out vacant office space, add a ping pong table and bean bag chairs, then watch the money roll in...

Actually I think I got it...; 10/26/19, 8:48 AM
Char Char Binks, Esq. said...: Reparations; 10/26/19, 8:49 AM
Freder Frederson said...: Sometimes it amazes me how stupid rich people are. Look at Theranos. Or all the money that has been thrown at Uber and Lyft, which combined are losing billions of dollars a year with no realistic path to ever making a profit. And now we have WeWork. Why didn't someone ask them: "how exactly are you going to make money?". And don't even get me started on Fyre Festival.; 10/26/19, 8:49 AM
Psota said...: Yeah it's hard to understand what was supposed to be so special about this company. They were buying real estate and leasing shared office space? Sounds like a REIT and property management company. Big deal!; 10/26/19, 9:03 AM
Lucid-Ideas said...: I like the way the Federalist put it. "Selling a dollar for 50 cents."

Any business is going to get huge traction and growth when it is - quite literally - giving away money in the name of growth.

Doordash and blue apron and Uber have the same problem. A business model where you're giving away everything practically free doesn't mean someone's not paying.

And the person paying is the retail investor, aka sheep. "And sheep get slaughtered..." - Gordon Gecko; 10/26/19, 9:06 AM
gilbar said...: rehajm said...
I still struggle understanding what their business model was supposed to be. Build out vacant office space, add a ping pong table and bean bag chairs, then watch the money roll in...
Actually I think I got it...

1 Underpants
2 ???
3 PROFITS!; 10/26/19, 9:08 AM
madAsHell said...: WeWork had sub-leased a tremendous amount of office space from Amazon here in Seattle.

If you spent 30-seconds reading their business model, then.......why did you invest??; 10/26/19, 9:13 AM
robother said...: "Soft Bank"? Was "More Money Than Brains" already taken?; 10/26/19, 9:15 AM
Michael K said...: The average age of then Board of Directors at Theranos was about 90, with the exception of David Boies who was in charge of suing anyone who told the truth.; 10/26/19, 9:16 AM
Seeing Red said...: Suckers.; 10/26/19, 9:19 AM
madAsHell said...: If I recall correctly, SoftBank has made poor investment decisions in the past. I'm surprised they didn't change their name.; 10/26/19, 9:19 AM
madAsHell said...: Holy Shit

Obama could not assemble a bigger band of fuck ups!!; 10/26/19, 9:20 AM
Lucien said...: Glad the thing never went public. Boy those VCs are smart!; 10/26/19, 9:30 AM
William said...: You don't have to be very old to remember when Amazon was selling for ten dollars a share and not making a profit. Analysts told you it was a bit of a scam and probably never would turn a profit. I think the analysts at one time issued cautions about buying all the FANG stocks.
The thing about the next big thing is that your don't know it's the next big thing......That's their business model. We lose money just like Amazon. You missed out with Amazon but here's your chance with us.; 10/26/19, 9:52 AM
Seeing Red said...: There was a Clinton shill who was the governor of NJ. He ran a hedge fund. $4-8 BILLION went POOF! And he didn’t know how that happened.; 10/26/19, 10:31 AM
Yancey Ward said...: In case anyone doesn't know, all WeWork does is sign long-term leases for office space, and then relet them on shorter terms. They add a bit of infrastructure to their managed properties that are supposed to be appealing to Millenials and GenZer types, and they also claim to be some sort of high tech version of Regus- a competitor who has a long history in this business. The company was sure to go bankrupt during the first commercial real estate recession, but they couldn't even make it that far. You can literally watch any video with Neumann and realize the man was a circus barker.; 10/26/19, 10:59 AM
NorthOfTheOneOhOne said...: On a related note:

The Millennial Urban Lifestyle Is About to Get More Expensive

Apologies if you've already blogged this Professor.; 10/26/19, 11:18 AM
Ralph L said...: I heard they had to write the value of the company down to WeeWorks.; 10/26/19, 11:19 AM
DavidUW said...: Again my modest reform proposal would have prevented this occurrence and saved SoftBank a lot of money.

Treat the money derived from borrowing against your equity as income and tax it, unless it’s reinvested in the company. Same rules as US homeowners are supposed to live by.

That way Adam would have had to sell shares, SoftBank would have had more leverage over him and could have paid less to get rid of him.; 10/26/19, 11:24 AM
elkh1 said...: I don't get outraged because it's not my money.

The story is fishy. Someone at Softbank is complicit, and is afraid of the guy who may talk. Ergo, a billion plus of shareholders' money to buy his silence.; 10/26/19, 11:46 AM
mccullough said...: The Best and the Brightest.

Elizabeth Holmes tips her cap to Neumann.; 10/26/19, 12:07 PM
Big Mike said...: What do you do if you’re a Japanese conglomerate?

Well, once upon a time the CEO and his direct reports would publicly apologize and resign en masse in shame and humiliation. But these days, who knows. As to Adam Neumann, in my book he’s every bit as bad as Bernie Madoff, who was sentenced to 150 years in prison or thereabouts. But these days ...; 10/26/19, 12:27 PM
bagoh20 said...: I'm sure the investors were what we call "experts" today, and they probably paid other "experts" very healthy sums to help them make these great expert decisions. "Experts"; 10/26/19, 1:40 PM
Bruce Hayden said...: “In case anyone doesn't know, all WeWork does is sign long-term leases for office space, and then relet them on shorter terms.”

Very dangerous. If the commercial RE market crashes, they would be left with long term leases and crashing rents to cover them. Very similar to one of the fasted ways to destroy a bank, according to my father who sat for most of a half century on the board of directors for several banks.; 10/26/19, 2:53 PM
YoungHegelian said...: Fools and their money, sometimes lots & lots of it, are soon parted.

Japanese fools and their money, especially when it comes to deals involving Americans & businesses in the US, are often parted.

Remember back in the 80s, how the newly ascendant Japanese were buying all sorts of stuff in the US at outrageous prices? How'd that all turn out for them? In retrospect, i think the large majority of them lost their shirts.; 10/26/19, 3:04 PM
Martin said...: Masayoshi Son must be wondering how he could have been so stupid. WeWork NEVER made sense... there are already plenty of actors in the area of shared office space; the market for that is, like real estate generally, very local; WeWork had no killer software or nonn-replicable concept... and on and on.

It was scarily reminiscent of the dotcom bubble of 1999.

As are Uber and a few others. The problem is not as widespread as in 1999, and most of the losers will be private equity (which I am fine with) and not the public equity markets, fortunately. It won't cause a crash like 2000-02.

But, still, it is disappointing that so many supposedly smart people would repeat mistakes from only 20 years ago. The senior people who dove into Uber and WeWork in 2015-2019 were not children in 1999, they were 20- and 30-something adults and most were already in the financial sector and observed that episode up close.; 10/27/19, 1:10 AM
daskol said...: Uber will make money when it can eliminate the driver. They'll have a massive network of riders and all the best data for deploying autonomous vehicles. Something like a regulatory drive to reduce private vehicle ownership could also help them. Their side business leasing and selling cars to drivers is worth looking at. There are several other ways in which Uber looks attractive in the future. Amazon's profitability really took shape when they decided to lease their excess server capacity and created the cloud computing platform that runs half the world's cloud services.; 10/27/19, 9:30 AM