I gotta speak up for capitalism here (which is mostly a glorified lifehack about how to allocate material resources). It has no chance to work when the "market" is a few hundred investors deciding what to fund based on pitches. WeWork is a classic failure mode of central planning
I'm fine with critiques of capitalism that go to town on how this much wealth came to be concentrated in so few hands. But the free market did its job here! It showed that WeWork was not a viable business, quarter after quarter.
At every stage of the process, normal people observed that WeWork's business model was not tenable absent billions of dollars of subsidy, nor did it have any tech component that would let them plausibly handwave this criticism away (like Uber woo about self-driving cars)
WeWork is like a Ponzi scheme if Ponzi had just said "I'm going to take all the money" and investors had willingly given it to him, plus a fee for his trouble
My question is—who actually lost money on this? Who pays into the SoftBank Vision Fund who will be left holding the bag? Or is it other people's money all the way down?
The social cost of WeWork is not just the employees who got a raw deal, but the hundreds of thousands of successful tech businesses this money could have launched and didn't. Part of the reason innovation is dead in tech is that you have to compete against bros with free money.
