After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny • Hacker News Board

Re: After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

#151

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 2:20 AM UTC

castratikron wrote: post #11

carrozo wrote: post #3

When SoftBank buys shares in a startup and then invests again at a higher valuation, Son says he has made a profit. That is legal under accounting standards, but SoftBank receives no money. The only change is that SoftBank has boosted the value of its original stake from, say, $1 billion to $2 billion by raising the value of the startup. In SoftBank’s income statements and return calculations, at least some of the ad…

That's known as unrealized capital gains, which is a totally normal thing to measure. But what's important is how the value is determined. With a company on the public market you theoretically have millions of actors constantly evaluating the price of something using the same information (10K, etc.). If it's a house you have an appraiser from the government to tell you what it's worth. These two examples are consider…

Matt Levine wrote that it's not as bad as it could be, because Softbank generally only counted valuations where at least some other investors were participating. So they weren't completely setting arbitrary numbers by themselves.

Re: After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

#152

Post by perl4ever » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 2:23 AM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #65

t_mann wrote: post #25

"Yet it turned out that Agarwal [founder and CEO of a SoftBank-backed startup] had borrowed $2 billion to finance his share of the purchase" According to a recent article in the Economist, SoftBank encourages its own employees to do the same with SoftBank shares. There is a chance that things go well and they will look like geniusses (like Michael Dell who took his company private in 2013 and returned to markets last…

Dell looks like a great story because the market is up almost 100% since 2013. It's hard to say it was a good decision on Michael Dell's part. He could've bought anything else with leverage in 2013 and it probably would've turned out equally well or better. Dell isn't exactly doing amazingly.

He could have liquidated everything and bought stock in Apple...

Re: After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

#153

Post by paggle » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 8:17 PM UTC

perl4ever wrote: post #150

paggle wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. One of the characteristics of American car culture is that the land that your car occupies as it travels, or makes short deliveries, is not charged “rent.” So unlike a food truck or restaurant, where you need to pay rent for setting up the thing, if you cook and deliver food from a moving vehicle your land costs, which are some of the biggest costs of a restaurant, can be just misappropriated from the pub…

That doesn't make sense to me, even trying to absorb your point of view. A moving car has to park somewhere a lot of the time. And parking costs money that ultimately pays for scarce land, so whether or not the money-making is actually happening on the move doesn't have much to do with whether the user is free-riding.

Right but you can park a car in a cheap area and then drive it through very expensive neighborhoods in downtown San Francisco cooking and delivering food while a non-motorized food vendor would need to pay through the nose for that space to prep and sell.

Re: After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

#154

Post by turkey99 » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 9:25 PM UTC

helltone wrote: post #87

I wonder about Improbable?

They had all of £700 revenue when SoftBank invested £500M. Not a clue as to what Improbable needed that for? to get those military gravy train contracts?

Re: After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

#155

Post by Andromeda88 » Sat, Nov 30, 2019, 9:35 PM UTC

mindentropy wrote: post #143

Andromeda88 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check YzerGroup for a real "money laundering". They started with YzerProperty(2014 or so). Then YzerMotors (2016). Now YzerChat. These startups all involves billionaires from Dubai. Btw YzerProperty and Motors do not exist anymore.

Do you have any material on their money laundering?

No. I don't. It is just a rumor in the market.

Re: After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

#156

Post by perl4ever » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 12:09 AM UTC

paggle wrote: post #153

perl4ever wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't make sense to me, even trying to absorb your point of view. A moving car has to park somewhere a lot of the time. And parking costs money that ultimately pays for scarce land, so whether or not the money-making is actually happening on the move doesn't have much to do with whether the user is free-riding.

Right but you can park a car in a cheap area and then drive it through very expensive neighborhoods in downtown San Francisco cooking and delivering food while a non-motorized food vendor would need to pay through the nose for that space to prep and sell.

Well, you're considering the alternative for locating that car, but why is that the correct comparison rather than the alternative for using that (moving) spot on the highways? Looking at the latter, maybe that business is providing more to society than other drivers in the same area.

Re: After WeWork, SoftBank’s Startup Bookkeeping Draws Scrutiny

#157

Post by alexnewman » Sun, Dec 01, 2019, 2:26 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #145

dboreham wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except when the FAANG company revenue turns out to be driven by the same fake money faucet.

What fake money faucet? The big tech companies have tons of paying customers, and tons of net income increasing at tremendous rates with tremendous moats.

Huge portions of advertisements are being shown to bots without detection. I'd guess google's ad sales are 25% overblown given my analysis of it's bot detection products.