201–210 of 291 posts
If I'm Neumann, I'm taking 200-250 million dollars of my 1.7 billion in winnings and giving it away to the laid off employees (about 90k each). Imagine the positive press you could drum up about yourself! All while keeping 1.5 billion dollars!
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i have no idea really, but considering that lawyers exist and a lot of money is at stake ... they ll connect some dots
This is a disgusting attitude and is exactly why these types of problems exist.
Why corporate boards are so inept, and allowed to remain so, I'll never understand. If you buy into the goal being "shareholder value" then plainly Softbank failed. One could make the argument that WeWork's board did the things that they thought created the most value - but if you implode in on yourself, you clearly failed. Even if the self-dealing was not outright legal fraud, it was plainly not to anyone's benefit…
The board has the perspective of _ownership_. The employee has the perspective of _being commanded_. Imagine something nice that you own- like your car. Do you feel compelled to understand your car? Must you be an excellent driver to own that car, if you can afford it? No. And while it's not exactly the same, the people generally look at the company as a machine that makes them money. They don't have to be good at an…
Nothing else in the environment matters if it's not on the balance sheet (most notably pollution, social disruption, and general human suffering). Yvon Chouinard has a great perspective on this in his book "Let My People Go Surfing" where he meditates on the paradox of running a private business that fights itself by automatically giving away portions of its revenue to charity rather than paying out shareholders/reinvesting in growth. What do you do when you see every sale your company makes as a failure in the fight against consumption/towards sustainability?
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Which new reality? The one where most of the population can read and write and where most hold degrees and diplomas? This isn’t the 1900s industrialization era, where employees were picked out of the farm fields to work in factories, having never gone to school. People are smart these days, layoffs aren’t as destructive as they used to be.
> layoffs aren’t as destructive as they used to be. Student loan debt cannot be discharged. Unsecured personal debt is at all-time highs. Nearly half of Americans have less than $1000 in savings. You are wrong.
> Nearly half of Americans have less than $1000 in savings.
Those both sound like bad financial planning. Pumping more money into the equation won't solve that.
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Not just anyone gets 16b of funding to lose 50% on it. You need to be a very charismatic CEO - maybe borderline cult-leader status
I think you also need some "special" investors. In this case softbank appreciated the crazyness of the CEO.
Softbank funded WeWork via the Vision fund, which is primarily funded with Saudi money.
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> was phenomenally successful at building a large, real business What? How? He built an 8b business with 16b in investment. Anyone can do that. Take 16b, put it in index funds, call yourself an investment bank. You'd get better returns than -50%, for sure.
I'd love to see you try. It's easy to turn $20 into $40, but as you approach larger numbers it keeps getting harder.
"To turn $100 into $110 is work. To turn 100 million into $110 million is inevitable". Edgar Bronfman
From the article, 2,400 employees is 19% of the peak of 12,500 employees on June 30. There was no mention of where the cuts were made however. I am curious how many "white collar" type jobs WeWork would have, since I heard from previous discussions here that they were hiring for roles in unrelated-to-real-estate things like machine learning. I would imagine that there are lots of hourly-type roles managing the sites,…
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Wow. You do realize most engineers have to work at far shittier companies and environments than FB? And for a lot less money.
Then they should research the companies in the post and if they're interested in a change apply as well. No listing in that post is catering to an ex-FB employee by any means.
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Events like this are the modern moral equivalent of the giant, gaudy, gilt-encrusted palaces of the 17th century. I think this vastly overstates it. Versailles cost some significant fraction of France's GDP - possibly as much as 25% in some years. WeWork's $10B is a mere drop in the US' $20T GDP.
WeWork is just one part of it, however. Uber is another Ponzi scheme, living on underpriced rides and multi-billion losses for as long as their bond rating holds up.
I use Uber all the time, as does everyone I know. Hell, I even drove for them for a while.
They provide a needed service and they are subsidizing that to get rid of competition like Lyft and to grow a huge user base. Then, it's likely they will raise prices and start making money.
But it is not a Ponzi scheme. Last I checked, a local taxi company that is still in business wants $30 to take me into town, which is 5 miles away. Uber is $7.