![]() ![]() To some extent, it goes back to the popular saying: “We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.” When these companies are getting attacked over their actions, they often feel wronged by the coverage, which they feel is unfair, because the press are often judging the decisions absent larger context that shows how they reached those results. It’s not difficult to see why this is happening. It should be noted, of course, that all of these companies are a bit different, and they all do take different approaches to the market, but over the last few years, especially, one thing that has shined through with many of these companies is that they’ve dealt with the challenges suddenly being directed at them as political issues, rather than structural issues. This one is more directed at the people who work at all of the big tech companies: Stop thinking about running your companies as political campaigns, and focus most on what is best for end-users. I wanted to write a follow up post, though, to make a slightly different point. Indeed, a followup story from the NY Times last week showed that a bunch of other tech companies - namely Lyft, Lime, Juul and Qualcomm - all had hired the very same “Definers” firm that Facebook had hired to smear its opponents. Karl’s post focused on just how many companies make use of similar political smear campaigns, and everyone (including the press) should be much more tuned into this kind of thing. Then, media and academics read the S-1 and started applying this incredibly prescient competence called math.Tue, Nov 27th 2018 09:35am - Mike MasnickĪ couple weeks back Karl wrote up an excellent analysis of the NY Times’ big piece looking at how Facebook tried to deal with ongoing criticism of the company concerning the influence operations that it appears Russians used their site for. The autopsy here will reflect death by S-1. The mandatory disclosure that the SEC requires in the form of S-1. The three worst performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year, their value destruction pales in comparison to the value destruction of WeWork.īut there is a silver lining. Macy’s, Nektar Therapeutics, and Kraft Heinz. That’s more value destruction than the three biggest losers in the S&P 500 lost all year. WeWork declined in value more in 30 days - SoftBank and all these smart people had their shares on their books at $47 billion - it went to zero in 30 days. And according to Goldman, it was worth $60 billion to $90 billion! What does that say about them? What happens to the New York and Chicago commercial-real-estate markets where WeWork was the biggest and the second-biggest tenants? What happens to IPOs? The reverberations here are going to be pretty dramatic. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs? These guys were about to collect $130 million in fees and then prop up some equity analysts to tell their private-wealth managers in the marketplace that this thing was $40 billion to $60 billion. If the only way it can survive is a deliberate strategy to make it a shadow of itself - massive layoffs, massive restructuring - there’s only thing they can do. So it’s hard to imagine they’re even going to get their investors their principal back. ![]() One is likely going to be a zero - that’s WeWork - of $11 billion. Between Uber and WeWork, you have $20 billion of the hundred billion. WeWork is the opportunistic infection that is going to kill the Vision One Fund. What is the biggest takeaway from the WeWork story?
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