WeWork Founder Misses Out on $1 Billion as SoftBank Cancels Share Buyout (cnn.com) 18
SoftBank is walking away from a sizeable chunk of its WeWork rescue package, which included a near billion dollar windfall for ousted founder Adam Neumann. From a report: The Japanese tech company has backed out of a plan to buy $3 billion worth of shares in the coworking startup from existing shareholders and investors, according to statements from SoftBank and a special committee of WeWork's board. SoftBank's chief legal officer, Rob Townsend, said in a statement on Thursday that the share purchase was subject to certain conditions agreed to in October. "Several of those conditions were not met, leaving SoftBank no choice but to terminate the tender offer," he said.
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving person (Score:1)
Thank that one person who decided to eat bat soup and plunge the world into this pandemic!
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More to the point, it's a poorly run real estate management company masquerading as an innovative tech company.
Moral backlash over wild excess? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a lot of people in the tech-trenches feel the same now as we did back in 2000, that the wild excesses of the VC-funded "burn as much money as quickly as possible" startups did more harm to the opinion of the public at large than anything else. I remember feeling the same outrage about pets.com and all the money that got flushed as a massive waste, even worse was all of the nascent tech R&D that got axed as companies belt tightened, remember "re-configurable computing" we almost had that in 2000, but the market crash meant FPGA-accelerator cards lost about a decade before they saw the street.
On the other hand, remember the $1000 Aeron chairs that littered the bay area auctions after the dot-bomb? I wonder what useful tech will be left of this spending spree that prudent startups will be snapping up? Last time it was the very first LCDs and lots of the large flat-glass monitors, a sudden bargain on eBay for servers and such. So in that sense the wild excess was somewhat helpful to the next round of penny-pinching boot-strappers who learned the lesson of frugality?
Re:Moral backlash over wild excess? (Score:5, Informative)
This time there will be nothing. Everything was done in "the cloud" so what all that VC money really did was buy infrastructure at Amazon, Microsoft, a little a Google and Oracle, maybe some pennies trickled down to places like Rackspace. Even office furniture won't have residual value this time because it was all open floor plan bullshit nobody wants. A good deal on an the Aeron chairs you mentioned is about as much as you can hope for.
Re: Moral backlash over wild excess? (Score:1)
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It will be kegerators this time. Hit up eBay to get a tap for every room in your house!
Tears (Score:4, Funny)
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That sounds like too much color to be WeWork's "free" "beer". :-D
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I'm sure you can find people who would be happy to tear him a new one.
The model (Score:2)
Rent office space, call it a "workspace solution".
Provide unlimited free beer (dude.. it's free beer!)
Limit the beer to 1.5 qrt daily.
Eliminate beer.
Fuck the VCs.
Profit!
(dude.. free beer!.. what else was there really?)
Re:The model (Score:5, Funny)
Calling the hoppy-ish, carbonated water at my WeWork "beer" is an insult to beer.
Softbank (Score:3)
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