That's the funny thing about Billions-with-a-b: normal thinking about money and value just doesn't work IMO.<p>The Vision Fund is going to lose ~$19 billion. But Masa Son still controls <i>over $80 billion.</i> That's more wealth and power than almost any human being will ever have in history, ever.<p>At that point the numbers don't even matter. Maybe Neumann took Masa Son for $50 billion. Who cares? A person can live in the USA for their whole lives without working on as little as $3-5 <i>million.</i> Throwing billions around like this, especially when it's digital/paper money in the form of stocks and big corporate deals, really puts the absurdity sprinkles on top of this whole turd bowl.<p>It's this kind of thing that makes people lose confidence in the system. Most people out here are sweating medical bills in the low $10,000's, while the news is talking about billions being gained and lost in the span of a few weeks - so fast it makes you wonder if that amount of wealth really even existed in the first place.<p>How much has to be "lost" between digital transactions before the numbers become completely meaningless? A trillion? A quadrillion?
Wow, this really drives home how absurd the whole WeWork thing was. And even until recently people were talking about how apparently Masayoshi San was playing some kind of three-dimensional chess and would come out the winner from WeWork. A fool and his money are soon parted, I guess.<p>Also, the post title is a nice nod to an Audrey Hepburn/Peter O'Toole movie dripping with '60s cool: <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522/" rel="nofollow">https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060522/</a>
I object to the word "steal" being used to describe Adam Neumann's actions. He did not take anything by force or deception (as far as I know). If I take a piece of dog shit, spray paint it gold and sell it as a bar of gold, you could argue that is "stealing" (or at least fraud). If I say "this is a piece of dog shit that I spray painted gold but I am selling it for the price of gold" and an adult of otherwise sound mind accepts the deal, that is not stealing. What Neumann did is more like the latter scenario.
WeWork/Uber/Airbnb... it's interesting how WeWork is classified as tech IPO next to these (e.g. Softbank used its "technology fund" to invest in WeWork). How did this happen? Isn't it an obvious real estate company? Is it because WeWork appealed to tech startups and remote workers?
>> He saw an excess of capital in Silicon Valley and a raw, unsatisfied ambition in SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son and his $100 billion Vision Fund<p>It doesn't take a genius to see this opportunity but it does take an incredibly lucky person to be in a position to exploit it.<p>If Adam Neumann doesn't end up in jail after all this, then I will concede that he is not an idiot.
I'd like to think that Adam Neumann will see some manner of ill effect for paying himself $1 billion of other people's money, while delivering negative value, but then reality comes crashing in to remind me that no, he won't.<p>Consequences are for people who don't have a billion dollars.
I'm more concerned about the discrimination in finance/lending, which is thoroughly entrenched at this point.<p>Anyone can borrow $50,000 for a new car, $500,000 for a new home, or $5,000,000 in venture capital if they are connected enough. But there is simply no money available for anything outside of mainstream status quo thinking. That's why the Ubers and Airbnbs and WeWorks in these times are founded on hustling and even skirting laws in some cases.<p>That's great and everything (I guess?), but I am personally tired of the hustling/hacking mentality. I'd like to see real progress in the standard of living for everyone in the world. That's founded on the idea of self-actualization, that everyone has the modest resources needed to start their own business or invent the things that help themselves and their communities.<p>How many people here have been on verge of financial ruin trying to get their ideas off the ground? I've been up, I've been down, but overall I've basically been running on empty for over 20 years. I'm tired of it. I didn't expect my career to turn out this way. And I'm deeply concerned about a looming recession forcing otherwise capable, intelligent people to scrape by underemployed, doing menial work to make rent because there isn't enough capital flowing. Because it's all locked up in a few wealthy peoples' hands, who have a very Laissez-faire view of economics.<p>All of the above is why I'm almost certain now that hard times are coming as early as next year. I've already been through it twice with the dot com bust and housing bubble popping, and we're overdue for the next downturn.<p>^^^ Note that this wasn't always the case. There were protections in place like the Glass-Steagall Act that lessened these boom-bust cycles, which were overturned by the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act and others. What we've been going through with this vast increase in wealth inequality is by design.<p>I was born in 1977 so I remember when it wasn't this way. But many of you reading this now were born after the corruption was instated and might not realize how honestly affluent middle class Americans felt in the 1980s and 1990s.<p>It can be that way again, but please, look beyond private sector solutions to these problems. The government is We the People, not some specter out to get us. I know that many of you live in Silicon Valley and other big cities that suffer from high taxes or government micromanagement, but I live in Idaho and have seen how the lack of government can lead to widespread poverty and environmental degradation.<p>Laws can change and movements do happen, which is why I'm optimistic that reforms are also coming and that we might finally see some relief in the 2020s.
I like Matt Levine's take on this: (re: Adam Neumann)<p><i>If you want, you can imagine him as a diabolical genius who explicitly set out to short the unicorn bubble and then walked away barefoot with a jaunty whistle and $700 million of SoftBank’s money, but that does not strike me as necessary or accurate. My model doesn’t require you to think that your startup is dumb! You don’t need to worry about Neumann’s personal beliefs and motivations at all, really. You can just think of him as a product of the invisible hand of the market. A lot of money was pouring into startups, there was a lot of demand, and the demand called forth supply, and the people who supplied the supply got rich; it is elemental and straightforward and has very little to do with questions like “is this a good business model?”</i>[0]<p><i>“Capitalism occasionally makes huge mistakes,” is part of the story, but the other part is that there are rich rewards for those who spot the mistakes and bet against them. This is a lesson specifically of financial capitalism: In most businesses you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and create value by doing a better thing, but the financial markets are special because you can notice a competitor doing a dumb thing and get rich by taking the other side, without creating value or doing a better thing. If you notice that people are buying dumb unicorn shares for too much money, you don’t have to invent a better way of doing business or of funding companies. You can just sell them as many as possible of the dumbest possible unicorn shares; when the bubble bursts, you collect your winnings. This sort of thing—getting rich by being smarter than your counterparties, making markets more efficient by being on the right side of bets—is a classic path to wealth creation in the financial business. Tech, traditionally, has a different ethos, one of getting rich by changing the world. But sometimes there are crossovers, and anyway maybe WeWork was never really a tech company.</i>[1]<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-02/the-trades-will-be-free-now" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-02/the-tr...</a><p>[1] - <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do-you-like-we-now" rel="nofollow">https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...</a>