We tend to focus on juicy scandals. In this case, it was/is terrible conflicts of interest combined with a "pump-and-dump" mentality that exit focused startups are prone to during boom times.
OTOH, the "system" worked, and wework investors got "busted" before IPO. It never reached the stage where pros and insiders cash out to public investors.
In retrospect, investor cash was spent/wasted by operating expenses... Operating expenses are salaries and such. It may be wasteful, but the losers are risk tolerant investors so c'est la vie.
In a "dot-com" scenario, a much larger amount (market cap) goes from public investors to private ones. If wework had succeeded in getting to this stage, it would be aweful.
Imo, we need more risk, not less. Professional risk investors though, they are too good at offloading that risk to where it isn't supposed to be.
Most of the institutional fixers (large funds, banks, regulators, sec, etc) suggest "fixes" that reduce risk. This is not a good thing. We need risk, and that includes a risk of shenanigans. I'd rather have a public blowup than an even more conservative professional investor class.
You're also ignoring one group of victims here. I wonder how the current and former employees of WeWork would feel about your assessment that it's "not so bad"? Their labor was no doubt compensated largely in the form of now-worthless equity grants. "Sorry you got screwed but this is necessary for the health of the investor class. Won't somebody please think of the investor class?!" How totally fucking odious.
I don't know how you look at WeWork and arrive at the conclusion that professional investors are at risk of becoming too conservative. Clearly, venture capital has stopped functioning with any sort of discipline or rationality if it can invest in companies like WeWork and Theranos which later turn out to be obvious mirages of pure ineptitude and greed.
Another issue is the often jaw-dropping cynicism of a business world so obsessed with doing things, that any concern with how they are done is totally ignored. It's a world in which "cheating" loses its meaning; anyone who is incensed at unethical, or even illegal (but not enforced) behavior is a naive rube. Ultimately, I think this happens because of a catastrophic failure of the justice system.
Business and personal accounting systems deny, ignore, and suppress those contextual details. So does the "investment" industry. And that makes a mockery of "price discovery" because the nominal market price always excludes critical externalities.
It's possible to become extremely rich without negative externalities. It just happens to be incredibly difficult. The looser your ethics, and the less empathy you have for competitors and victims, the easier it gets. It's a feedback loop which rewards unethical behaviour.
Essentially, money itself is a form of morality-laundering. It's an integer when it should be a complete trace through a common contextual event map.
You run into a technical issue in that you can trace a dollar indefinitely in both directions. But perhaps there's a solution, like some sort of decay.
Neumann and his wife have been getting rejected from several condo boards in NYC since the scandal came out:
https://pagesix.com/2019/10/03/ex-wework-adam-neumann-ceo-re...
What complicates the picture though is that these lying/cheating/bullshitting financiers work some of the most hours in society. It’s a weird new phenomenon where the very richest and the very poorest are all working very long work weeks.
The poorest are cleaners, care workers, and teachers though, and then there’s these rich people pulling off scams, losing money and contributing nothing of value, yet still getting paid a shitload.
I’m reading “Liar’s Poker” now, and man it is awful learning the anti-social attitudes of these workplaces and knowing that this book then became something that further promulgated those attitudes.
I've read a lot of these post mortem articles. They all feel like the author wished he was Neuman, wished he got away with the millions. I am a software engineer, have been for 20 years, I always felt I was contributing to society. I've build things that make people's life easier (in exchange for teaching my kids, baking my bread or treating me when I'm sick). These predatory people do not bring anything to the table but are regarded as gods.
An interesting problem. The answer is partly that there is more to life than money - and as another poster mentioned, there's really not much leisure involved. The cheaters legitimately work very hard!
Essentially, I think the Gervais principle [1] is largely true. And therefore it's fine, and from a spiritual perspective, strictly better, to be a loser. (And I don't think there's any harm in trying to find an exception to the principle - tilting at the windmill of an honestly made fortune!)
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
However, the Gervais principle book is a very shallow version of lamrim that aims at explaining how the real world works. It also puts people into 3 categories: the clueless majority driven by forces, the small minority that's trying to escape these forces and the those who've largely escaped them and are now free. The sociopaths from the gervais principle are on the right track in general, but they make a common mistake on this path that lamrim discussed at length and so they slide into the nihilism dead end.
Bingo. That's also the best explanation of the concept I've seen.
It's a good read, in an entertainment sense, and there are some lesson to be gleaned -- but the same is true with the Bible, the Koran, or the Rig Vedas.
And no, bullshitting your way for a mere 5 (?) years of your working life cannot be compared to the 40+ years of work of anyone else.
And no, putting a name on a principle does not make it common sense.
But yes, making a small fortune from your hard work and genius is totally acceptable. Fair and square
All that happened was a bunch of rich people paid for a guy to live like a king. They certainly suffered financial losses, even though they may still be rich.
A bunch of rich people lost money gambling on a guy. Laws requiring transparency before access to public markets brought it to down to earth. It seems to me like the system worked well.
The 'wealthy people' involved could sue in civil court and win based on a "clear and convincing" evidence standard and a proven pattern of bad behavior. You'd imagine it'd be worth a try. It would also be a reputational matter for the institutional investors who put money in the venture - sue so that people are unambiguously deterred from trying stuff like that in the future.
What about the employees of WeWork? They lose their jobs because "a bunch of rich people paid for a guy to live like a king."
They lose their homes, access to health insurance, the ability to retire someday.
There's a big difference between some billionaire losing some rounding errors and someone trying to provide for their family.