So I'm especially glad to see the current crash, as for me it represents businesses founded on "fuck around" finally finding out what business fundamentals are.
I'll be interested to see what happens with other massive capital consumers from this era, with the poster child being Uber. It's plausible to me that even on its own terms Uber will never generate profit above the $20 billion of capital it took. Let alone getting into the black once we count its more obvious externalities.
Their product was letting people take leveraged gambles on crypto, so arguably not a social good.
I do agree that this era of low interest rates has led to some companies getting absolutely massive without ever turning a profit. But hey, that playbook worked for Amazon. Most tech companies have substantially lower capital requirements than WeWork, and can weather this sort of downturn as long as they have a reasonable cash position. Sure, Uber might not make back the amount of funding it's burned through, but that's different than it having a business where the unit economics will never work out.
I also think Amazon is distinct in that they chose to not have profits because they saw better uses for the money. Bezos could have declared big profits long before he did, and there was a noisy contingent of investors who were agitating for it. Bezos instead chose long-term investment in ways that upended our notion of commerce, and whose effects are still playing out.
I think that's very different than WeWork and Uber, where a lot of investor money was burned on subsidizing the core business. At least in Uber's case there was a theory, which was basically, "Use the rise of mobile to capture the global taxi market (while externalizing the capital costs to the desperate) and then use pricing power to extract Google-size monopoly rents." Maybe not a great theory, but at least something articulable. Whereas WeWork never made any sense as a business beyond a hazy "Uber for offices" handwave.
In terms of warehouse square footage, they are the biggest by a wide margin (~320M sqft - probably more now) https://www.bigrentz.com/blog/amazon-warehouses-locations
Now they're playing the card of AWS but for physical logistics. They're opening up their warehouses and logistics as a service to others.
Every company ought to be investing it's profits for long term gains.
The fact that Apple is sitting on so much cash that it doesn't know what to do is not a great play.
I'm willing to bet that in 10 years, Amazon will be bigger than Apple in market cap.
ISTR the banks just got caught out having made egregious poor bets.
AIG though is a bunch of fucking criminals.
That said, with this I agree 100%:
>I'm glad we're saying goodbye to this weird story of excess, and I won't ever have to read about WeWork again.
They're just going through bankruptcy, not dissolving the company. WeWork will be around for many years to come.