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Comment by bitL | Hacker News Reader

I am sorry, what is the problem here? Their Vision Fund is for funding risky ventures with the hope one unicorn pays off the cost of all the others and more. Of course they won't stop. The WeWork exercise might have been about testing the waters of hacking people's perception instead of fundamental analysis and they were riding high for quite a while, so it almost worked for them.

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WeWork "almost worked" the same way every large bubble or ponzi scheme almost works if you don't count the last day when everything inevitably comes crashing down.

I think it was ultimately an exercise to see if people are lazy enough to pay for convenience and brand. It almost worked for them which says a lot about the state of society. One could argue Uber's business model is not that different either...

It wasn’t even close to working as a business. They lost a fortune and had no path to profitability. It almost worked as a way of extracting dumb money from retail investors.

How did it almost work at extracting dumb money from retail investors? It didn’t even get close to an IPO. They paid a bunch of banks to have some meetings, but as soon as the numbers were disclosed, no one seems to have been fooled.

Hah! Everything is a ponzi scheme while in growth mode in the venture space if it's not profitable. There is most certainly a universe where the We brand isnt stained by greed, goes pubic, loses 15% early, but survives long enough to innovate survival.

The fault was that they killed the big story with Neumanns greed and it cratered confidence of the public markets and press.

I know people say this a lot on Hacker news...but, that is not the model of Venture Capital.

And the Vision Fund has not only invested in high risk ventures.https://visionfund.com/portfolio

Vision Fund's "investment" in WeWork is effectively a hostile takeover of a distressed asset. It is one of the most conventional bets they have made.

It’s their own distressed asset.

Yes, it is now their asset. After they built a stake and gained control.

Even the common takeover trope of relationship building between an insider and the acquirer happened here. All Vision Fund's dealings with WeWork seemed to go directly to Adam Neumann. And to be frank, he seemed to be out of control, he was going manic, and it seems as though this was encouraged by Vision Fund.

Neumann did very well out of the deal. What happened to the other co-founder?

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