> Firstly, it's not just a totally neutral act to hatch a plan to juice the numbers to a ridiculous extent and try and dump it onto public markets before it explodes. That's literally an attempt to scam you out of your pension fund.
Sadly that is the entire premise of the Softbank Vision Fund and many others like it.
Masayoshi Son is now personally on the hook for about $5.1 billion on side deals he set up at SoftBank Group Corp.
..As SoftBank grew into a global investor, Son argued the company couldn’t keep talent unless executives were allowed to cut side deals that tied compensation to the company’s performance. That’s exposed him further to the current market downturn.
> the entire plan was that he'd become a billionaire whilst everyone else's pensions would take the hit, and even having failed he walks away a billionaire.
Is that so? When do you imagine Adam Neumann hatched this scheme? At the very conception of WeWork in 2010 when nobody would invest? Truly a supervillain.
Or perhaps four years later when WeWork was "the fastest-growing lessee of new office space in New York" and was on track to become "the fastest-growing lessee of new space in America." By which point everybody was calling him a genius visionary? I don't recall anybody complaining at that point that this company is doomed to fail or anything like that. It appeared to be on an upwards trajectory.
Perhaps he turned to the dark side when SoftBank showed up and demanded they grow the company even faster by throwing money at them? And what was Masayoshi's plan when he invested?
> and even having failed he walks away a billionaire.
What did he fail at specifically? Masayoshi tried to squeeze him out of his own company and Adam called his bluff. So Masayoshi got the press to drag him through the mud and trashed the valuation further in the process. Then covid happened. Had Masayoshi succeeded nothing would change except SoftBank owning a larger percentage. I don't see why you favor one party over the other.
My pension was never invested in any of this and neither was yours. This is as you noted, Saudis, Chinese, Koreans, and JPMorgan attempting to simply buy their way into what seemed at the time a very promising market with their overwhelming cash firepower.
Why you should feel sorry for them is beyond my comprehension.
It's wild that you seem to be giving Neumann a free pass here. He was the founder and CEO of a company that lost 10s of billions of dollars and was eventually forced out for non-performance (and borderline fraudulent activity) so the adults could step in and salvage what was left of the company.
I don't feel sorry for his investors either. You are needlessly painting this situation as one side "good" one side "bad" when "all sides bad" is much more honest.
> By which point everybody was calling him a genius visionary? I don't recall anybody complaining at that point that this company is doomed to fail or anything like that. It appeared to be on an upwards trajectory.
I recall quite a bit of skepticism at the value add of a middleman leasing and then subletting commercial office space, something with zero network benefits and no barrier to entry. Especially on HN, I would even go so far as to say it was widely expected to fail.
> Or perhaps four years later when WeWork was "the fastest-growing lessee of new office space in New York" and was on track to become "the fastest-growing lessee of new space in America."
Any company can grow very quickly if they give away dollars for fifty cents and have a shitload of dollars.
At running the god damn company. Honestly, are we going insane here? He took tens of billions of dollars and created a company that was worth maybe $5Bn. Yes! It grew incredibly quickly, it's amazing how many customers you can acquire and deals you can sign when you're overpaying for leases and renting out space at a loss. He created a terrible business that was burning through cash, desperately hoped he could dump it on unsuspecting pension funds and when he couldn't the whole thing blew up in his face. But not before lining his own pockets every step of the way. Even, once the company was going bankrupt, he insisted on a generous payout to walk away from the company he mismanaged into failure. He wasn't rewarded for success, he was paid out because he had controlling shares, and once again, he had those shares because he was running the business more as a scam than an ongoing concern.
Exactly. Listening to Marc's discussion about this reminds me of him wanting to jump into the space and see this calculation playing out in his head where cheap-money >> Adam's self-dealing. No surprise this deal happened right at the time when the high-interest environment was starting to kick in.
Sadly that is the entire premise of the Softbank Vision Fund and many others like it.
-- https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-02-08/masayoshi...> the entire plan was that he'd become a billionaire whilst everyone else's pensions would take the hit, and even having failed he walks away a billionaire.
Is that so? When do you imagine Adam Neumann hatched this scheme? At the very conception of WeWork in 2010 when nobody would invest? Truly a supervillain.
Or perhaps four years later when WeWork was "the fastest-growing lessee of new office space in New York" and was on track to become "the fastest-growing lessee of new space in America." By which point everybody was calling him a genius visionary? I don't recall anybody complaining at that point that this company is doomed to fail or anything like that. It appeared to be on an upwards trajectory.
Perhaps he turned to the dark side when SoftBank showed up and demanded they grow the company even faster by throwing money at them? And what was Masayoshi's plan when he invested?
> and even having failed he walks away a billionaire.
What did he fail at specifically? Masayoshi tried to squeeze him out of his own company and Adam called his bluff. So Masayoshi got the press to drag him through the mud and trashed the valuation further in the process. Then covid happened. Had Masayoshi succeeded nothing would change except SoftBank owning a larger percentage. I don't see why you favor one party over the other.
My pension was never invested in any of this and neither was yours. This is as you noted, Saudis, Chinese, Koreans, and JPMorgan attempting to simply buy their way into what seemed at the time a very promising market with their overwhelming cash firepower.
Why you should feel sorry for them is beyond my comprehension.