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WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

businessinsider.com

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Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#221

Post by somberi »

SilverBirch wrote: post #122

This was always the weird thing about WeWork, after the collapse of it's ridiculous valuation people were like "Well, it's still a business, similar to IWG, it has some value". But the truth is no, the only thing WeWork had was a series of liabilities. They had signed a bunch of agreements to rent office space long term at a high price. The valuable part of IWG is that they have rental agreements with buildings that…

SilverBirch - You may be correct, and I agree with your point about IWG is a genuine business. However, it also is worth pointing out that their stock has been the lowest it has been over the past 5 years (I believe 5 years is a fair window that overlaps with WeWork).

Stock price: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/IWG.L/

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#222

Post by d0gsg0w00f »

ninth_ant wrote: post #134
wahnfrieden wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He worked hard for it! lmao edit: to be serious... there's certainly a lot of difficulty in achieving what he did no matter the failure, but when we use the word work to compare an employee worker and a ceo owner, let's be more specific with what we mean. we all understand work here and we talk about its structures day in day out. a ceo's day to day work has you running memeified mental contortions to understand how…

A single parent working three jobs just to cover rent and food works hard. Grifting hedge funds maybe isn’t easy, but get no sympathy from me for “working hard.” Lots of people work hard.

A CEO presumably is also keeping those jobs alive. Businesses don't run themselves. _Somebody_ has to do it and I bet it's a shot job.

Makes you start to understand why certain cultures vehemently upheld arranged marriages. Having kids with the wrong person makes for a lifetime of hell.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#223

Post by SantalBlush »

robertlagrant wrote: post #207
kodah wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Well, for their customers they are making the world a better place. Given there's no absolute standard for that, people wanting your product or service so much they'll pay you money for it is about the best measure we have.

This is a well-established and researched part of market failure. It involves the idea of negative externalities, like how a market for heroin creates a social cost that is borne by the general public.

And you're right that a market transaction is the best measure of "good" that we have. To get some sense of "what society might pay" to limit or eliminate such a market, an analyst must resort to more difficult methods like cost-benefit analysis. It's a huge topic and is used by major governments.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#224

Post by moomoo11 »

zdragnar wrote: post #211
moomoo11 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most fucked up thing I heard is about people investing in artificial wombs. You want to know the actual reason they’re doing this? It’s not because some restrictive laws were passed or to keep the physical toll low on the mom, etc. maybe it is, but that would be found in the marketing slide. “We are too generous with how much leave we offer” Everything is to extract as much value out of everyday things as possibl…

What does an artificial womb have to do with parental leave? Mothers already spend historically low times recovering in hospitals post delivery. Parental leave is about bonding with the child and providing care for it while it is especially vulnerable. That's why it is called parental leave- some countries and a growing number of companies offer it to fathers as well.

I'm in the US so I have no clue about other countries.

Like I said in my post, the doctors visits while carrying the baby, the PVT due to stress and other factors, and the maternity/paternity leave (at companies I've worked they allow 6-9+ months maternity and 2-4 months for paternity). Companies know they will offer these leaves, but the in the lead up to that there is a lot of OOO and unrealized effort.

There are people at every company and at large who are crunching efficiency numbers while we sit there hammering out features and fixes.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#225

Post by gigatexal »

belter wrote: post #154
gigatexal wrote: post #59

And Neumann gamed SoftBank for 1B. Amazing. The amount of grift at the highest eschelons of business is hilarious.

With some help... - https://www.cnbc.com/video/2019/01/14/watch-cnbcs-full-inter...

Oh Ashton. SMH.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#226

Post by rufus_foreman »

Ekaros wrote: post #146
sidewndr46 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Success as an individual is doing well for yourself. Success as a society is building a system where people do well for themselves by making other people better off.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#227

Post by barelyauser »

anonymouskimmer wrote: post #196
barelyauser wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Success is personal. If your goal is to increase the amount of wealth for everyone then go for it. With that said, remember the following. While the economy is not zero sum and we can increase the amount of wealth in the world, power is zero sum. Power is finite and very scarce. You can create tremendous wealth and later find out it ended in the hand of a single person. And that person is not willing to share.

> power is zero sum. Power is finite and very scarce. As technology[1] increases power increases. It is social capital to convince others that is zero sum (holding the number of people constant). [1] - and here I mean all technology, not what's commonly called 'tech' today. > You can create tremendous wealth and later find out it ended in the hand of a single person. And that person is not willing to share. Having a…

Note the fact that I did not mention money. I mentioned wealth. Holding a huge bag of money is useless because as you stated, people can now choose to use another currency and I lose all my money, it becomes worthless. Or people can work for each other, without money.

But what if I own all the productive land? What if I own a corporation that manufactures a product you depend on? This is wealth.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#228

Post by kelipso »

pessimizer wrote: post #161
kgwgk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It never had that much value but it has taken $22 billion of perfectly valuable money and set it on fire: "WeWork has raised a total of $22.2B in funding over 23 rounds." https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wework/investor_fina...

I'm sure that plenty of that $22B came from the sale of other inflated assets to buy into WeWork. WeWork isn't the only scam out there; the economy seems largely dominated by scams (things whose values are determined by their moment by moment success in hyping bullshit) and cons (things that make money by providing services enabling the hyping of bullshit.)

Financialized economy, no manufacturing base, etc etc. Don't want to doomer I guess, but the land has plenty of resources and educated people so recovery wouldn't be too difficult.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#229

Post by lxgr »

fallingknife wrote: post #11
CPLX wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean if it used to be a very large pile of US currency then yes, it definitely had a lot of value that was apparently destroyed.

Losing money doesn't destroy wealth. It just transfers it from one place to another.

"Losing money" is not the same thing as destruction of value.

Re: WeWork has frittered away $46.7B in value as the stock sinks below ¢50

#230

Post by bombcar »

mschuster91 wrote: post #151
bombcar wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m fully convinced that YouTube not making money is some sort of accounting trick utilizing the fact that it rents bandwidth and compute from Google.

The only thing saving YouTube from going down under is that Google supplies it with bandwidth. Egress-dominated bandwidth is hella expensive, and video (especially if you're going 4K) demands tons of it. Netflix eases that problem by providing ISPs and other interested parties with racks full of what are essentially ultra-performant NAS systems [1] for free , but that's only realistic because the utter majority of Ne…

I’m not so sure that YouTube isn’t dominated by a small cacheable percentage of content. They could probably save significant bandwidth just by caching Baby Shark (and if they’re not, they’re missing something).

Egress bandwidth is pretty cheap if you’re not paying a cloud provider for it.

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