> "chronicling the wiles and humiliation of Adam Neumann, WeWork's day-drinking co-founder, former CEO, and chief snake-oil salesman"
And at that point, it's a solid argument that they all would have been better off if SoftBank's capital had instead been previously allocated to non-zombie / financial-engineering businesses.
As far as I can tell, your average Joe or Josephine not only does not invest in these vehicles, they cannot! Because they are not accredited investors and/or Softbank's Vision Fund is not accepting new capital. So if you're a normal person worrying about getting conned after reading about WeWork, don't! If you're a rich person, consider settling for the market average rather than trusting an individual like Masayoshi Son with your money.
As far Masayoshi Son going to jail, the payoff for Neumann was likely contractually obligated or negotiated to get better leadership into place. Unless some law was broken -- which I doubt, and almost certainly not provably -- criminal charges do not seem to be appropriate. Bankruptcy does not seem to be in the cards either considering he did not have that much exposure to WeWork.
The absolutely do, even if they might now realize it. The stickiest and most sought after capital for funds is typical from pensions or large asset managers.
AFAIK has always been this way for at least a decade.
An example would be Docker , has raised more than 200M yet it had no decent stream of revenue , it's litterrally a dead man walking yet the CEO left the boat years ago with tens of millions...
Startups that failed and have their founders go "bankrupt" are startups that you never ever hear about... The rest of startups you'll find on HN or have raised 100M+ millions often have their founders pocket millions when they raise very large amount ( 50M+ )...
There no surprise here , once you manage to get a business to a certain valuation / run-rate it's worth a lot thus you can trade that for cash , regardless of the "humiliation"
It's fine to describe situations where people lose their lives as "tragedies", for example. It's possible to go overboard by projecting emotions onto the audience that they don't actually have.
If they purport to be objective journalism (and not all articles need be that) then yes, definitely.
Seems that Axios plays a little loose with these guidelines outside of politics (their main wheelhouse). I think it's probably a mistake, to the extent that they are interested in keeping their reputation for good journalism.
Yes. Articles written in an emotionally charged way in order to influence their readers are a flavor of brainwashing - telling the reader what to think, or even worse, trying to influence them without their knowledge or consent.
Furthermore, the fact that an individual or organization is trying to emotionally manipulate you at all is a huge red flag. The best possible scenario is that they're doing it because they think that they know what's good for you better than you do, and after that it's a toss-up between "they want to make money" (ads) and "they want to control you" (authoritarians).
Emotional manipulation is also a classic tool of tyrants, and is necessary in cases where suppression of the population through pure brute force isn't feasible.
Yes, "There's always a value judgement being made about what is important to report." - but that's unavoidable, because reporters have limited resources. Adding in emotionally-charged (or straight-up manipulative) language makes the bias strictly worse. The fact that totally unbiased reporting is impossible is not an excuse to embrace more bias than is necessary.
> It's fine to describe situations where people lose their lives as "tragedies", for example.
I respectfully disagree, for the reason that news organizations actively pick-and-choose words like this that are emotionally charged and don't have precise meanings in order to slant their articles. While most events that a news organization would describe as a "tragedy" are indeed so, some of them are not. Moreover, even if that word isn't used, readers will understand when events are tragedies anyway - the number of people who weren't aware that a plane crash was a "tragedy" unless it was explicitly pointed out to them (and who were then convinced by the use of that word) is an incredibly tiny sliver of the population.
That’s why we talk about Adam Newman. It’s not conjecture that he’s projections were delusional.
It doesn’t make the reporting any less objective because they are describing how a book portrays someone.
I recall reading their mission statement a few years ago and getting the impression that they were trying to be impartial and fact-based. However, all of the articles that I've read from them recently (~6 over the past year) have been similarly emotionally charged. Perhaps their vision has changed?