201–210 of 274 posts
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I’ve ridden this stock down almost all the way (came in at $5 then 2.50 then again at $0.50). I am a pretty bad investor in that my top criteria is to buy stocks that produce a good or service I love and then stick with them a long time. As an operator WeWork adds so much value to us as we staff up all over the world. I love being able to go into any city and have a fun energetic and aesthetically beautiful environme…
I used to work at Microsoft and loved the ability to fly to different cities and have a great workspace where everything "just works" and stimulating conversations with new people in the field. A valuable "invisible" tool of thought if you do R&D. I didn't think this could be possible if you didn't work at a bigco, but then along came WeWork.
I don't have access to their internal data so don't understand their complete model, but it seems to me they have significant value and could definitely comeback.
I bought FitBit heavy, dollar cost averaging in and at one point paid around $40 a share, and ended up losing a decent amount (I think my average price was $10 and GOOG bought it at $7), but here I am years later still wearing a FitBit and it's great. I hope the same happens with WeWork, that they survive this dip and figure out the economics (maybe getting acquired). Come to think of it, could be a good buy for GOOG–they could pitch Google Cloud heavy to all WeWork users.
Disclosure: I don't own any WeWork.
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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.
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.
It never had that much value, it just made it look like it did for long enough to get people to invest in it at vastly inflated prices. "Renting offices to work in" was never going to be a silicon valley style success, because it just can't scale that way.
Specially because those offices were so noisy you could never get any work done. Best places however for finding a date... "What people actually do at WeWork" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16292423
The real value of the cowork space was to be around other entrepreneurial types and perhaps even meet a young and hot ambitious babe. The “work” was an excuse to just hang around the same place day after day.
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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.
Most businesses do not "make the world a better place". It was a mistake to ever believe that it's realistic that every business can do that and really only served the egos of those who have uttered those words. Most businesses are providing a service or a product, that thing may be useful, but there's a pretty high bar from that point to "making the world a better place".
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Coworking is absolutely still going on. My wife and I go to https://kiln.com/ which is a fantastic option if you are in SoCal or Utah. They seem to be thriving. The workspaces are fantastic, they get us all the benefits of going to a (very nice) office with none of the downsides (we choose when to go, and they're a five minute bike ride from the kids school.) Lots of opportunities to meet other members, network, and…
I’ll never understand why you would want to subject yourself to an office AND pay for that experience. Networking aside (why can’t that be done outside of a co-working environment), I don’t see any benefits. I would rather dump the $3,900 per year into my mortgage or other debt tbh.
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Elon said that when he acquired Twitter it was burning $4 million per day.
Their net income back in 2021 was -223.32 mil. So only ~0.6 million per day. The interest payments on the $12.5 billion of debt Musk offloading to its balance sheet to fund his 'purchase' is way more than that. Basically Musk alone costs Twitter about the same as 4000 - 8000 employees. Which is why he had to fire that many people.. Seems like a great deal. Not that I mind him running Twitter into the ground it's horr…
If you had told me 6 months ago that I would grow to hate the clown emoji, I would have been bewildered.
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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.
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.