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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

It has already committed $65 billion to acquire big stakes in Uber, WeWork, Slack, and GM Cruise.

Uber and WeWork[1] are money drains buying market share. GM Cruise is a "fake it til you make it" operation. Is Softbank the biggest dumb money operation of all time?

(WeWork is strange. Most real estate businesses buy property and rent it out. WeWork rents property long term and rents it out short term.)

[1] https://news.crunchbase.com/news/wework-details-run-rate-rev...

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What makes you say Cruise is faking? The disengagement data would suggest they're the most viable self-driving car venture behind Waymo.

The technology isn't there. There will never be self driving cars.

If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. - Peter Ustinov, via http://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup

Cruise seems to operate like it has an unlimited reserve of money. They also have a bit of a broculture. They are hiring like wildfire.

All self driving tech is in its early days to call it “self - driving”. So it will be interesting to see how the future pans out.

May be you can indeed keep on throwing ridiculous amounts of money and something and make it work. May be not.

Cruise has made admirable progress but with 1/3rd miles and infrastructure they are way behind Waymo. Other players have basically existed the endeavour more or less so they do get to be at #2.

Maybe Softbank wants to sell it to a bigger fool? They invested in Flipkart, a competitor of Amazon, and then sold it to Walmart. But I gotta admit, they'll need to find extraordinarily dumb money to buy their stake in Uber.

> Maybe Softbank wants to sell it to a bigger fool?

How is Walmart a bigger fool incase of flipkart, they wanted to gain an entry into Indian ecom and prevent Amazon to capture the entire market.

Walmart could've started out on their own. They wouldn't have been far behind because e-commerce is still new in India. But no, they spent billions buying a glorified smartphone shop that people will desert the moment they stop offering deep discounts.

> Walmart could've started out on their own.

They could have and it would have taken years to build a brandname or they could buy an established player and get the brandname from day one. Walmart went with the other option.

That is how big companies operate, nothing to do with India.

Is Google a fool to buy youtube when they had Google Video?

Fair point. I'd argue that youtube has way higher network effects than an ecommerce shop and that Google paid a comparatively smaller 1B$ for a richer global market than the 16B$ that Walmart paid to grab a bite of the Indian market, especially with the political risk involved. I'll also wager that Walmart could've spent a lot less by getting exclusive deals on new smartphones along with deep discounts to quickly grab a huge chunk of the marketshare.

I could be wrong. With the absurd amounts of QE that went on for so long, maybe valuations that price in earnings decades away are justifiable.

1. Time and cost of building and growing a new e-commerce platform, especially for a giant like Walmart is non-trivial. I bet the requirement design alone would take a year to be approved.

2. Big companies often fail in new and unfamiliar markets.

3. Consider acquisition price inflation. If YouTube was created in this period, its selling price would be near $20B just like WhatsApp.

Smart operations in the co-working space manage property, they don't rent it. Source: GGV interview with founder of Naked Hub @ https://soundcloud.com/ggvcapital/grant-horsfield-of-naked-h...

That said, I tend to agree Softbank news has suggsted some very weird pending or closed investments, notable eg. in our space = Zume.

How is Cruise BS?

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