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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

Something tells me this isn't a whole lot of money for said people...

It looks like Adam will walk out as a billionaire while all other employees will stay poor...as with almost every startup nowdays.

This goes back way further than startups. I believe Marx and Engels had some thoughts about this.

The problem here is that startup employees have a combination of high risk with low expected reward compared to big company employees. It doesn't make sense to be a startup non-founder employee nowdays.

> It doesn't make sense to be a startup non-founder employeenowdays.

TBH, it never really made sense. There were few lucky shots and tens of thousands of sad stories.

You're right, but it's much better documented now that people can read the stories on the internet, and I'm still not seeing the shift to equal term sheets for employees and investors.

Also employees have higer risk than investors, so in theory they should get better terms, they just don't have the negotiating power.

Seriously, screwing over workers and keeping the rich rich is yet another thing that Silicon Valley likes to think it invented, but this is, in fact, not new.

Disagree, there is a big difference between investing 200m where you can expect a return on investment and just giving someone 200m to go away. There is a return on the other money SoftBank has invested, but the 200m itself is a cost, and rather large. Most money transfers of this size are exchanges of capital for equity or debt, not gifts of cash.

I guess that's why investors tell you to, "diversify your investments".

They are buying control, no? Neumann sold economic interest (non voting equity) to Soft Bank earlier. Now they want the voting power and they are offering him 200M for it. It has to be worth something. It sounds like it is unclear if that is enough (although if they are reporting it I assume it is) for him to agree.

This 200m is for JP Morgan and UBS who extended 500m credit line to Neumanm and he promptly drawn down $380 million.

As JP Morgan is pushing for different vision of WeWork restructuring this is a pill to make sure they won't show loses on the credit line to Neumann.

I doubt that Neuman would be left with more then a few $ in his pocket.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/business/wework-jpmorgan....

Isn’t Softbank about to invest 5bn? 4% of that just for a single individual who’s ostensibly a big part of the reason they tanked a 40bn dollar valuation to a mere 20% of that seems like a literal fuckton to me.

Of course, he may be the reason they now control an 8bn dollar company too, still an incredible valuation I suppose.

It's slightly over one percent of the money Softbank has/will put in, from what I've read.

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