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Comment by hef19898 | Hacker News Reader

hef19898

By now SoftBanks only saving grace is setting tons of Saudi money on fire...

I was surprised to see Adam Neumann as a keynote speaker at the Future investment conference in Riyadh a few weeks ago. I thought perhaps he'd be persona non-grata due to burning so much in saudi $.

NEOM is a $500B project. Neumann barely registers.

My understanding is that the best thing you can do in finance is make loads of money, but the second best thing you can do is set loads of money on fire.

This. Nothing succeeds like failure.

I've actually heard of VCs who prefer founders who have had high-profile failures because their theory is those founders will have learned a bunch of valuable (expensive) lessons. The null hypothesis for me is those founders may not have learned those lessons and may just not be that great.

This seems to me like expecting that someone indicted for a crime will learn their lesson and be less likely than average to commit crimes in the future. It makes some sense in the abstract, except that we have tons of empirical evidence that those people are more likely to commit future crimes.

Or perhaps expecting someone who committed crimes and got caught to have learned how to not get caught.

Neumann still retains an incredible level of confidence and respect from many of the people who know him. never met the man personally but it's kind of a trip. even from people who i suspect are less clouded by whatever world-class charisma he works. i'm not sure what's true and not but i'm also not surprised he's the keynote.

If I was Neumann or Son, I wouldn't be visiting Saudi Arabia.

Why? It's one thing to dismember journalists (The despots running that country don't want them anywhere around them), but when you start doing that to businessmen, nobody is going to do business with you.

The only message it will send is that they are roughly on the level of El Chapo, or some other cartel leader, when it comes to 'Should I work with these guys?'

Dude, in 2017 King MBS turned the Ryadh Ritz-Carlton into a torture chamber for ~400 of the wealthiest and most powerful Saudis. Maybe you don't remember, maybe you don't care. Either way, that should tell you something.

That was a local political purge, not a business one. They also use slave labour to build stadiums, and nobody gives a shit, but the second some visiting CEO gets impressed into a worksite is a red-line they aren't going to be crossing.

Local businesses and politicians have no choice when it comes to working with those animals, foreign businesses absolutely have a choice. That's the difference.

It's a country run by people who are happy to murder and torture people they don't like. The chance that someone like Neumann gets dismembered is incredibly low, but it's certainly higher than the chance of it happening in, say, Sweden.

Sadly, this is a pittance for the Saudis.

They’re blowing away trillions building stupid mega projects in the desert. A few billion is small potatoes

Have they even lost money in aggregate? Like I know WeWork and others ended up being worthless but didn't they also have some homeruns?

They have lost tens of billions on ~150 billion invested, much of that during boom years.

On the other hand, they might be on the verge of profitability depending on how some of their investments go.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftBank_Vision_Fund#Notable_i...

For example: Arm, ByteDance, Mapbox, Nvidia, Slack. All real companies with real businesses that have huge potential.

> they might be on the verge of profitability depending on how some of their investments go.

Just like everyone else.

There's a whole post there. It's not just one out of context sentence. Maybe focus on the examples I gave to support that sentence.

Sure, let's take an example. Nvidia might be a real company with real products but that has little bearing on your investment value if if you sold it all in 2019. Even less if you invested with a different fund than you sold it as part of so it looks more successful than it was. ("Successful" being an awful word, since they lost 400 million.)

I don't have any context for other funds, but I have a really hard time believing that it's hard to do better than break even at that scale of capital.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SFTBY/softbank-gro...

I wonder why those numbers are so different than the ones on this website:

https://companiesmarketcap.com/softbank/earnings/

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