If they wanted to, they could slow down on new purchases/rentals/construction and likely become profitable without too much trouble. But that would of course be at the expense of growth.
Not saying they're a great company or that they deserve a crazy high valuation, but suggesting that they're unprofitable because they have a bad business model is missing the whole picture.
If they are going to have to shut down all these sites the second the market slows down (or indeed as soon as the obligations are due), perhaps one might argue it was imprudent to open them to begin with.
Any marketing benefit gained by being "everywhere" is surely undone when they have to publicly shutter a large portion of their locations.
As long as a sophisticated large corporate sees a net benefit of being in a wework they will stay.
As an analogy, everyone knows running servers on AWS is more expensive per unit of compute than running your own hardware, however, there is a genuine value for a company to hand off the running of an office space (and the capital investment on buildout) to a third party in exchange for predictable monthly opex.
Coffee shops are great places to get work done for a few hours. But stay in one for a whole day and you start to get weird looks unless you are buying coffee continuously. And once you buy enough $5 coffees to justify sitting there for a day, you might as well be in a WeWork.
Working from home simply isn't an option for many people. If you live in a downtown area, you likely don't have the space for a proper setup. Even if you do, many people don't like working alone. Also, if you want multiple employees working together in person, an office starts to make a lot more sense.
So I actually think the freelancers and small businesses who remain in business are the last ones to leave. If you chose to be in WeWork in the first place, you probably like it, and the cost of office space there is negligible compared to payroll. The first ones to leave are the corporate customers who cut head counts. Small companies tend to have less waste, so it's hard to cut people in a downturn. Big corporations, where the people making the firing decisions don't actually know the people being fired personally, have easier time laying people off during recessions.
When the money's tight, being short on space doesn't necessarily keep you from doing it anyway. Hot desking at WeWork would cost more than half my rent.
Might be that the concept of huge corporate campus won’t be so popular in future and companies start looking at more flexible solutions.