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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.

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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.

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