For everyone here defending Adam, I pose this question.<p>How exactly is capitalism supposed to work when people can use their power to funnel money to themselves from company funds while everyone else who took on equity to work at a startup is fucked?<p>Is the answer "be more careful next time"? If that's the case, why would people follow the rules of
law when someone else is able to fuck over hundreds of people and walk away a billionaire. Why should employees not try and steal from their company when the CEO can do it _and_ get a golden parachute when their behavior destroys the value of the company?
Perhaps it would be good if all material facts related to a company must be disclosed to all share/option/warrant holders once the number of equity holders or claimed value of the company exceeds a certain threshold. At least an annual balance sheet, income statement, and cap table.<p>I've found that in practice the legal rights of minority shareholders are often not respected in private companies and there's not a lot that you can do about it.
Its only “self dealing” when you haven’t granted yourself that right, if the organization type has a constraint from the government or if it doesnt then if the organization type doesnt have bylaws specifically allowing you that right.<p>WeWork was structured by Adam to give himself that right my mere nature of unilateral control via consolidated ownership and voting rights.<p>Part of the grievance is that his “self enrichment” torpedoed the IPO, which is not part of reality which is that employees and “minority shareholders” were sold and bought a dream that the market was laughing at the whole time.<p>WeWork’s structure was always rat infested with a valuation nobody would accept. These payments wouldnt have changed that, its debt load, burn rate and subsidiary structure was the problem.<p>This case has no merit and that court is not the venue to air these grievances.<p>I think a more effective idea would be to push for exchanges like Nasdaq to reject listing companies with these share structure attributes.