Before he was the majority voting shareholder he couldn't. After he gained control of 65% of the votes....

Wall Street Journal article from 2019: https://www.wsj.com/articles/weworks-ceo-makes-millions-as-l...

Accessed via: https://archive.ph/jzsxI

Reminds me of Enron, where the clowns in charge happily handed their corrupt CFO Andrew Fastow hundreds of millions to run a private equity fund that purported to purchase loss-making assets at a profit to Enron.

Then, after Enron reported good quarterly numbers, this fake fund would simply sell the stake back to Enron, with the CFO taking a gigantic management fee for orchestrating the charade.

Public companies have been banned from doing this, but I guess anything goes when you're private.

It is merely a translation error on my part.

Uber and Airbnb don't do that, they are just the service for others to rent out their assets.

So the risk of running costs in times of low business activity, such as a pandemic, is not on their side.

Ehh, I disagree. OP is incorrect in that WeWork owns little of their own real estate, but from what we can tell they were leased at fair market rates from their actual owners (some of whom are Adam Neumann himself, which is... bad).

The only parties that really got fleeced here were Softbank and their totally unclothed VC siblings who bought Neumann's messianic complex like rubes. Building owners by and large seem to have been treated fairly?

I would argue the gig economy has been worse, since those who got fleeced were largely working people being squeezed and having massive externalities and liabilities dumped onto them.

Uber and Airbnb are sustainable because they exploit in the first place. They have zero risk on the assets because they are owned by the users.

Seems he internalized the lessons from Ray Kroc, only he used real estate to extract wealth from investors/shareholders instead of franchisees. "owning the land on which the burger is cooked"

https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/16/we-company-ceo-in-hot-wate...

Scene from "The Founder" "You have a miniscule revenue stream, no cash reserves, and an albatross of a contract....

What you ought to be doing is buying up plots of land, then turning around and leasing said plots to franchisees, who as a condition of their deal should be permitted to lease from you and you alone. This will provide you with two things: One, a steady, upfront revenue stream. Money flows in before the first stake is in the ground. Two, greater capital for expansion. Which in turn fuels further land acquisition, which in turn fuels further expansion. And so on and so on. Land... That’s where the money is. (BEAT) And control."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxCL2RqCuiY

It is merely a translation error on my part, I meant own or possess.

Uber and Airbnb outsourced the risks of these assets.

If some cars or flats are suddenly no longer in demand, there is no cost to them.

If WeWork had functioned like an Airbnb for offices, underperforming locations would have been less of a problem.