Softbank is trying, rather clumsily, to avoid "losing face". Looks like they came to the conclusion that should they let wework follow the natural course of things, it would taint the image of all their other investments.

The thing is, this is not going to work. Public market investors are wary and are not ready to buy over-valued assets without some really good reason. The party is over, and it doesn't mean we are entering into the apocalypse, but rather that the time of irrational dreams is over, and that we need to think things based not on irrational ideas, but by paying more attention to the fundamentals.

Money can still be made, but the whole VC world needs to stop thinking that every business is going to generate the absurd returns facebook and google gave. Those are black-swan events. Not every startup will give 6000% returns. Those were anomalies, it is not going to happen every day.

But, the thing is, even a 200% return over 5 years is a great investment. Most of time it would beat DOW or NASDAQ indexes even reinvesting dividends.

So, maybe excessive greed is breeding irrealistic expectations, which in turn is feeding terribly bad decisions.

At least it was SoftBank bailing them out and not taxpayers.

'Too Big to Fail' means that the government steps in to bail out a company because its failure would be a threat to the economy. Private companies have been saving each-other from liquidity crises for centuries, because bankruptcy destroys a lot of value.

I mean... SoftBank sunk a lot of money into it. So, from SoftBank's perspective it is too big to fail...

That's really the goal of modern business, isn't it? Pump a business full of cash and grow at massively unsustainable rates. If your company collapses then you take down a bunch of other businesses and industries which relies on the investor-subsidized stuff you bring to the market, making your company too big to fail.

With the sheer amount of venture capital at your beck and call, you can also force out challengers trying to enter the market easily by dropping prices even further (and who cares, you're already non-profitable!) or just straight up buying them out.

Profitability doesn't even matter as long as your business is considered valuable! Even better if you can get tax payers on the hook for saving your asses.

When they own/lease a shit ton of physical assets