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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I am here to repeat my sort-of non-but-almost conspiracy theory: It's not about the work, it's about the value of the Listed Property Trust (LPT), as a construct, if the entire central business district price model behind buildings tanks.

Every company of this scale is in LPT. They have shitloads of money tied up in the declared value of the office space either they invested, or they leveraged. If it tanks in value, they are on call for the decline in value related to that.

Thank you for reading my almost but not quite tinfoil hat conspiracy theory.

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This isn't even a conspiracy theory, it's just true. I mean, some of it is definitely induced attrition (you always want the expensive people to quit, in the Milton Friedman cinematic universe), but the rest is that the commercial real estate market would collapse tomorrow if businesses couldn't justify their 10- or 15-year commercial leases. Not for nothing did endless headlines about how "going into the office is super cool, actually" run in our most august financial publications, like WSJ and the Economist, right around the time RTO mandates started showing up.

I'm pretty sure that Meta don't own most of their buildings, so this wouldn't apply to them.

But it probably applies to a lot of their shareholders, and they have big influence.

Nobody except Mark Zuckerberg matters for Meta. He has majority control of the board voting rights.

It seems much more likely that this is driven by the fact that Facebook culture has always been very much around in-person 1:1 contacts between people. This frustrated me a lot when I was there, but it did seem to work for a relatively long time.

Boards have a finance subcommittee and review income on investments. Meta does not invest 100% of its worth inside Meta, it will have billions of dollars invested through merchant banks who in turn balance in private equity, shares, and property. The property component will be reporting risk on lower future returns if the building declines in value as an asset. His fund manager will be advising him that signals to increase occupancy reduces his risk.

That he wants to do it, is an added bonus.

This is the man who changed the name of his company to focus on the Metaverse.

I find it very unlikely that he's listening to his bankers on strategy.

Don't get me wrong, I think the property value thing is a part of RTO, I just don't think it matters in this particular case.

This isn't a conspiracy theory it is just a fact. They already invested in the offices and the people who own everything have a lot of money in commercial real estate.

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