re: Japanese bank will pay WeWork ceo Neumann $2b to go away. (Payoff details are insane)

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It's almost smart, they have ensured they won't be allowed to go bankrupt/fail - too many other parties who would be negatively affected.

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In the short term, yes. Long-term (and not that long), they've provided the playbook to backfill their vacated space. It's already well outfitted to move a more stable competitor in right behind them, or a REIT can develop a platform to operate that space themselves.

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i don't think Uber is anywhere close

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I'm not a financial guru nor have I ever cared enough to really look into it, but I just don't unerstand what the heck Uber spends so much money on to not be able to make a profit?

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REIT can develop a platform to operate that space themselves.

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I would try this route, if I owned a building they were leasing. They (wework) don't have a problem finding tenants for their offices, and this whole co-working space as we move into more consulting/free lance type jobs, has really taken off.

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I would try this route, if I owned a building they were leasing.

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The only issue is that you need some scale to make the economics work. That's why REITs can do it. They own a bunch of buildings, so it makes sense to invest in your own short-term sublease operator who can control all their co-working space and develop a brand name. Then your can also contract out to buildings owned by others.

The co-working idea has legs, but you need some scale.

[img]As an aside, most institutional owners were limiting We's presence in their buildings to around 10% of square footage to limit systemic fallout should something happen. There's been skepticism in the industry for awhile.[/img]

The building I work out of limited WeWork to 3 of 19 floors. They tried to lease 3 more full floors, owners said no thanks.

There definitely skepticism and has been for a while. But there are certainly some owners who saw the lease dollars and saw how that might inflate the value of their building who went heavy on WeWork

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The way the company is set up with drivers not being employees, I just don't get where the high expenses are going.

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Most of the fare goes to the driver, I would guess. Then, technology infrastructure, talent, R&D, marketing, etc. That all costs a ton.

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But I guess I'm asking in the very literal sense, what the heck are they spending billions of dollars on?

And again I'm asking admittedly from a clueless perspective. The way the company is set up with drivers not being employees, I just don't get where the high expenses are going.

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This is from their second quarter 10-Q filing. That's just for the quarter.

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i honestly think WeWork will be the inflection point on the tech bubble

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Did you catch that Atlantic article someone shared on here the other day?

LINK

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Starting about a decade ago, a fleet of well-known start-ups promised to change the way we work, work out, eat, shop, cook, commute, and sleep. These lifestyle-adjustment companies were so influential that wannabe entrepreneurs saw them as a template, flooding Silicon Valley with “Uber for X” pitches.

But as their promises soared, their profits didn’t. It’s easy to spend all day riding unicorns whose most magical property is their ability to combine high valuations with persistently negative earnings—something I’ve pointed out before. If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you’ve interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that’s three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent.

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But this was never going to last forever. WeWork’s disastrous IPO attempt has triggered reverberations across the industry. The theme of consumer tech has shifted from magic to margins. Venture capitalists and start-up founders alike have re-embraced an old mantra: Profits matter.

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This example is not a hypothetical. The meal-kit company Blue Apron revealed before its public offering that the company was spending about $460 to recruit each new member, despite making less than $400 per customer. From afar, the company looked like a powerhouse. But from a unit-economics standpoint—that is, by looking at the difference between customer value and customer cost—Blue Apron wasn’t a “company” so much as a dual-subsidy stream: first, sponsoring cooks by refusing to raise prices on ingredients to a break-even level; and second, by enriching podcast producers. Little surprise, then, that since Blue Apron went public, the firm’s valuation has crashed by more than 95 percent.

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To be a website for people to track real estate and potentially use as kind of a FSBO market.

Now they are actively involved in flipping houses all over the country and are going at it very quickly, and according to Eisman, without nearly enough local expertise.

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Wow, never seen anything like this he is getting paid to leave a company he destroyed.

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How did he destroy it? It's the same as its always been. Not his fault that Softbank didn't do their due diligence. Good for him.