WeWork bankruptcy filing may happen next week as market cap falls to $60 million.
      • teamevil@lemmy.world
        11·
        1 year ago

        The CEO started a workshare in Manhattan…got invested got SoftBank or someone to invest…so the way the scam worked is the CEO would get loans from the company buy office buildings and lease them to we work. Hell he trademarked “we work” and sold it to the company…he got crazy rich though.

      • Pregnenolone@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        1 year ago

        CEO was a classic god-complex character who thought everything that came from his ass was magic. They expanded way too quickly and never had a path to profitability. Pretty sure they were cooked before the pandemic, which is even worse.

      • Thetimefarm@lemm.ee
        6·
        1 year ago

        He personally trademarked the word “we” and then sold it to his company for 5 million dollars. He also owned a lot of the buildings the company had signed absurdly long leases on. It was literally a company set up with the sole intention of funneling VC money into his pocket directly. Even for the shady-ass world of start ups and VC firms what he did was pretty blatant. That’s not even getting into how he portrayed the company as a tech start up when it just simply was not. It’s like how Tesla and Ford sell about the same number of cars but Teslas market cap is 17x higher because they call themselves a tech company. At least with Tesla you could probably argue they were a tech company at some point early on, WeWork was never a tech company at all. Neumann got his start renting the spare office space he had after his previous company failed and just decided to run with it.

  • SrTobi@feddit.de
    23·
    1 year ago

    I love this. It shows how you can dupe investors by promoting yourself as a tech startup? (IWG is another coworking space rental)

  • bstix@feddit.dkEnglish
    20·
    1 year ago

    Speedrun. The evaluation was in 2019. Ridiculous. Whoever had a stake in it might as well be trading penny stocks.

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.worldEnglish
      16·
      1 year ago

      eh. WeWork never posted actual profits. They relied on venture capital to stay floating.

      The venture capital is running out because, it turns out, venture capitalists like to see returns on their investments. it’s different than twitter, IMO.

  • Rambler@lemm.ee
    9·
    1 year ago

    I’ll fuckin bet someone came out singing ! Why do we allow this to continue to happen to penny shareholders? And workers alike.

  • GlitzyArmrest@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Spaces like this would never work for me in the first place. Why would I travel to a fake office building that my company has nothing to do with to work? I would rather work from home, a library, or even a fast food/coffee shop than go to a pseudo office.

  • Ejh3k@lemmy.worldEnglish
    7·
    1 year ago

    The Good, Bad, Billionaire podcast did an episode on Adam Neumann in the not so distant past. Didn’t really add anything I didn’t already know from watching the Jared Leto show on him, but it was still entertaining.