How to Steal a Billion
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How to Steal a Billion
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Re: How to Steal a Billion
#2I'd like to think that Adam Neumann will see some manner of ill effect for paying himself $1 billion of other people's money, while delivering negative value, but then reality comes crashing in to remind me that no, he won't.
Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#3I'd like to think that Adam Neumann will see some manner of ill effect for paying himself $1 billion of other people's money, while delivering negative value, but then reality comes crashing in to remind me that no, he won't. Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.
"I need this billion dollars to avoid the consequences of taking this billion dollars."
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#4I like Matt Levine's take on this: (re: Adam Neumann)
If you want, you can imagine him as a diabolical genius who explicitly set out to short the unicorn bubble and then walked away barefoot with a jaunty whistle and $700 million of SoftBank’s money, but that does not strike me as necessary or accurate. My model doesn’t require you to think that your startup is dumb! You don’t need to worry about Neumann’s personal beliefs and motivations at all, really. You can just think of him as a product of the invisible hand of the market. A lot of money was pouring into startups, there was a lot of demand, and the demand called forth supply, and the people who supplied the supply got rich; it is elemental and straightforward and has very little to do with questions like “is this a good business model?”[0]
“Capitalism occasionally makes huge mistakes,” is part of the story, but the other part is that there are rich rewards for those who spot the mistakes and bet against them. This is a lesson specifically of financial capitalism: In most businesses you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and create value by doing a better thing, but the financial markets are special because you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and get rich by taking the other side, without creating value or doing a better thing. If you notice that people are buying dumb unicorn shares for too much money, you don’t have to invent a better way of doing business or of funding companies. You can just sell them as many as possible of the dumbest possible unicorn shares; when the bubble bursts, you collect your winnings. This sort of thing—getting rich by being smarter than your counterparties, making markets more efficient by being on the right side of bets—is a classic path to wealth creation in the financial business. Tech, traditionally, has a different ethos, one of getting rich by changing the world. But sometimes there are crossovers, and anyway maybe WeWork was never really a tech company.[1]
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-02/the-tr...
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#5I'd like to think that Adam Neumann will see some manner of ill effect for paying himself $1 billion of other people's money, while delivering negative value, but then reality comes crashing in to remind me that no, he won't. Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.
"If you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem." ( J. Paul Getty )
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#6I'd like to think that Adam Neumann will see some manner of ill effect for paying himself $1 billion of other people's money, while delivering negative value, but then reality comes crashing in to remind me that no, he won't. Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.
I'm going to bet that he has several months of hard reflection about life and maybe write a book about it. Maybe he'll try to pull a Steve Jobs and try a few new companies to redeem himself.
But you know, the next few years of his life are going to be mildly unpleasant, and we shouldn't forget about the emotional impact about that. Maybe he'll have a very public come-to-Jesus moment that will be cathartic for everyone involved, or maybe he'll disappear from public life forever with his vast WeWork wealth and live on some estate in an exotic locale.
But either way, this failure isn't going to be easy for him. He's going to feel several emotions and not all of them will be pleasant.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#7Wow, this really drives home how absurd the whole WeWork thing was. And even until recently people were talking about how apparently Masayoshi San was playing some kind of three-dimensional chess and would come out the winner from WeWork. A fool and his money are soon parted, I guess.
Also, the post title is a nice nod to an Audrey Hepburn/Peter O'Toole movie dripping with '60s cool: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522/
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#8I like Matt Levine's take on this: (re: Adam Neumann) If you want, you can imagine him as a diabolical genius who explicitly set out to short the unicorn bubble and then walked away barefoot with a jaunty whistle and $700 million of SoftBank’s money, but that does not strike me as necessary or accurate. My model doesn’t require you to think that your startup is dumb! You don’t need to worry about Neumann’s personal b…
I mean, maybe he was a genius fraudster, but maybe he convinced himself to believe in what he was selling -- which made him all the better of a salesman.
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#9I like Matt Levine's take on this: (re: Adam Neumann) If you want, you can imagine him as a diabolical genius who explicitly set out to short the unicorn bubble and then walked away barefoot with a jaunty whistle and $700 million of SoftBank’s money, but that does not strike me as necessary or accurate. My model doesn’t require you to think that your startup is dumb! You don’t need to worry about Neumann’s personal b…
I mean, maybe he was a genius fraudster, but maybe he convinced himself to believe in what he was selling -- which made him all the better of a salesman.
As George Costanza famously said “it’s not a lie if you believe it”
Re: How to Steal a Billion
#10I'd like to think that Adam Neumann will see some manner of ill effect for paying himself $1 billion of other people's money, while delivering negative value, but then reality comes crashing in to remind me that no, he won't. Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.
I'm going to bet that he has several months of hard reflection about life and maybe write a book about it. Maybe he'll try to pull a Steve Jobs and try a few new companies to redeem himself. But you know, the next few years of his life are going to be mildly unpleasant, and we shouldn't forget about the emotional impact about that. Maybe he'll have a very public come-to-Jesus moment that will be cathartic for everyon…
I think this is overly optimistic, what you're saying.
What's he gonna lose? Friends who invested with him? He can buy new ones.
Feel bad? You can literally hire a whole team of therapists for life.
He can sit in his mansions and not be in the public eye forever, it's not like being in the public eye is some sort of requirement for living.
Heck, he might even find a new following among people who want to emulate how he grabbed all that money.