Adam Neumann seems to be doing his slight of hand again and people are falling for it

From the Bulwark -
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Remember WeWork? In case you’ve forgotten: WeWork is/was a company that rented co-working office space. It presented itself as a tech company and rode investment from Softbank to a $47 billion valuation. Eventually people woke up and realized that not only was WeWork not worth $47 billion, but that the corporate ownership structure gave insane levels of control to founder Adam Neumann who, in addition to being highly erratic, used this control to extract about $700 million from the company.1

As WeWork crashed and lost 93 percent of its value, its investors realized that the only way to prevent the company from going to zero was to get rid of Neumann. And so Neumann held the investors hostage and convinced them to pay him another $200 million just to go away.

As I wrote at the time: Think about that for a minute: This asset, WeWork

Will be worth $0.00 if its founder remains in control.

But it might be worth slightly more than $0.00 if the founder leaves.

So the bankers are going to pay this value-sink $200 million not for services rendered, but simply to disappear.

Yay, capitalism!

It gets worse. This $200 million payday will be on top of the $700 million dollars in phantom value that Neumann already extracted from the company before the rest of the market realized that WeWork was a sham. And it will be coming at nearly the same moment that WeWork lays off some 2,000 employees.

I don’t know anything about these workers. And I don’t know what sort of severance they’re getting, but I’m willing to bet that:

(1) None of these employees was such a negative value that their continued presence would have bankrupted the company, as Neumann’s was.

(2) None of them is going to be paid $200 million to stop doing something that’s killing the company.