\u2018At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud?\u2019: NYU Biz-School Professor Scott Galloway on WeWork<\/p>\n\n\n\n
http:\/\/nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2019\/10\/marketing-expert-scott-galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n How much of the company\u2019s problem was solved when Adam Neumann stepped down? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At this point, I would say about none. He and SoftBank entered into a suicide pact, and he jumped out of the plane before it hit the ground. He pulled the rip cord. He has exited the suicide pact with $740 million, and everyone else gets to ride this out to its logical end, which will likely be a bankruptcy file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But\n that doesn\u2019t rescue the entire idea of WeWork, right? It just scales it\n back. Is their profitability dependent on the chance that some WeWorks \nwork and some don\u2019t? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There\n probably are a minority of WeWorks that are cash-flow positive and \ncould sustain a corporate headquarters with 80 percent fewer staff. They\n have 15,000 employees; I don\u2019t see any path that doesn\u2019t involve 5,000 \nto 10,000 layoffs in the next 60 days. Then the question is how to \nrestructure. This is now a distressed asset that requires immediate \nrestructuring. So does SoftBank want to put more capital in? If SoftBank\n does not want to put more capital in, they can\u2019t cut costs fast enough \nand it will be a Chapter 11. If SoftBank does want to put money in, they\n need to basically cut costs. They\u2019re going to need to close a massive \nnumber of offices, and they\u2019re going to need to lay off somewhere \nbetween a third and two-thirds of staff at corporate. The consensual \nhallucination here continues. This is a distressed asset in free fall \nthat is inarguably worth less than zero. Because all we have here is an \nentity burning $700 million a quarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where does the comparison to Travis Kalanick begin and end? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Travis is guilty of being an asshole. That was more like frat-bro-culture problems. The market is going to have to decide how thin the lines are between vision, bullshit, and fraud. Nobody ever accused Kalanick of fraud. You\u2019re going to start hearing that a lot more at WeWork. If Goldman Sachs told them that they were going out with a valuation of $60 billion to $90 billion and the thing is worth zero two weeks later, are Goldman that stupid or were they told something that wasn\u2019t true? There\u2019s reports that they were giving 100 percent commissions to put tenants in the buildings and then figuring out some sort of accounting jiujitsu to try to turn those expenses into revenues. The notion that they brought in people to solve the problems of their own making \u2014 they\u2019ve invited pyromaniacs to put out the fire. <\/strong>The first thing they did was sold the $60 million plane that the board bought or approved. Either Adam hadn\u2019t told them about the plane or they approved a $60 million plane. At what point does malfeasance become fraud?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \nAdam Neumann fired? He was liberated. This guy just played this \nperfectly. Could you imagine what his life would be like right now? If \nhe was still CEO? Showing up every day to an office where he had sold \n$750 million and everybody else was trying to figure out how they were \ngoing to pay the rent on the new apartment they had moved into because \nthey thought they had $7 million in We stock?\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n It really makes you rethink that picture of Neumann walking around barefoot in the middle of the tempest.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Why wouldn\u2019t you be happy? You haven\u2019t even begun to see the anger that will be unleashed on Adam Neumann. He has 15,000 people right now who are stuck cleaning up. They feel like circus clowns shoveling the shit behind the elephant of Adam Neumann. He has taken $750 million and left a toxic-waste cleanup.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Is this a case of self-delusion? Did Adam Neumann believe his own story?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t know. I speak from some experience as a CEO in the \u201990s in the internet days: If you tell a 30-year-old male he\u2019s Jesus Christ, he\u2019s inclined to believe you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Basically Uber started the decline and WeWork has massively increased the momentum. It\u2019s like we\u2019ve had this cocaine-fueled party at Studio 54, Uber was the lights starting to go on, and now they\u2019ve gone on so bright it\u2019s like you\u2019re in an operating room.<\/strong> Endeavor couldn\u2019t get out. Basically, these guys have totally shit in the IPO pond.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What other companies are still in Studio 54 right now? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s\n a lot of them in the SoftBank portfolio. Wag, Compass. These things \nwere kind of insane. Peloton. Peloton is getting pelted so to speak, \nbecause that\u2019s more yoga babble. Delivering happiness. It\u2019s a good \ncompany, it\u2019s just overvalued. The marketplace is sort of saying that \nafter WeWork and Uber, there\u2019s two types of companies in the unicorn \nspace: ones that are overvalued and ones that are just going to zero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can only blame charismatic CEOs for so much. What is wrong with investors? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s\n a few things at play here. One is just a function of the marketplace. \nIt\u2019s frothy, and there\u2019s more capital than operators. Any operator who \nhas a vision and can promise the potential and convince people they can \nbe the next Google or Facebook can attract billions of dollars right \nnow. The reality is there\u2019s more money out there. We reached \u201cpeak \nfounder\u201d with Travis Kalanick. Now, there\u2019s always a tension between \ncapital and founders around who has power. Ever since Steve Jobs and \nBill Gates, slowly but surely the pendulum has swung back to the \nfounder. In the \u201990s, founders didn\u2019t survive. We were seen as crazy, \nand once the company became real, we were to be shoved to the side and \nsome 55-year-old CEO from PepsiCo was supposed to come in and be the \nreal CEO. Then when Jobs was ousted and a series of gray-hairs came in \nand almost brought the company to the ground and he came back and took \nthem from $3 billion to $300 billion, that changed everyone\u2019s perception\n of founders. Then Bill Gates took a company from zero to $500 billion. \nSo Bill Gates and Steve Jobs totally changed the market\u2019s viewpoint on \nfounders and the balance of powers shifted way back to founders. \nFounders were seen as DNA and visionary. We\u2019ve not seen another peak. \nIt\u2019ll start swinging back. This is a train wreck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What is the biggest takeaway from the WeWork story? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n The bigger story here is SoftBank. WeWork is the opportunistic infection that is going to kill the Vision One Fund. It\u2019s beyond repair. Between Uber and WeWork, you have $20 billion of the hundred billion. One is likely going to be a zero \u2014 that\u2019s WeWork \u2014 of $11 billion. So it\u2019s hard to imagine they\u2019re even going to get their investors their principal back. WeWork is ground zero. If the only way it can survive is a deliberate strategy to make it a shadow of itself \u2014 massive layoffs, massive restructuring \u2014 there\u2019s only thing they can do. 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. And according to Goldman, it was worth $60 billion to $90 billion! What does that say about them?<\/strong> 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. WeWork declined in value more in 30 days \u2014 SoftBank and all these smart people had their shares on their books at $47 billion \u2014 it went to zero in 30 days. That\u2019s more value destruction than the three biggest losers in the S&P 500 lost all year. Macy\u2019s, Nektar Therapeutics, and Kraft Heinz. The three worst performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year, their value destruction pales in comparison to the value destruction of WeWork.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But there is a silver lining. The marketplace stepped in. The mandatory disclosure that the SEC requires in the form of S-1. The autopsy here will reflect death by S-1. Then, media and academics read the S-1 and started applying this incredibly prescient competence called math. Essentially what happened is that the employees of We who didn\u2019t get a chance to sell, SoftBank, and some other institutional investors have lost $47 billion. Had this consensual hallucination gone on for 60 more days, retail investors would have experienced that loss. So this is a good thing! This is the markets working. Whereas Uber, the consensual hallucination continues<\/strong>. They have to maintain the illusion of growth. They have to maintain the growth story. Without the growth story, they\u2019re worth 20 percent of what they\u2019re worth now. I think that chops off 50 to 80 percent in the next 25 months. WeWork can start from zero. If they act crisply enough, it can still be a nice, cute office-sharing company. Uber has to maintain the hallucination. Uber has to keep chasing that eight ball.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What does the WeWork fallout look like? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n There will be some pain at SoftBank, but they\u2019re all billionaires. They\u2019ll be fine. It\u2019s embarrassing for Masayoshi Son, but big deal. MBS\u2019s Saudi Arabia investment fund? Couldn\u2019t happen to a nicer group of people. It\u2019s the latent collateral damage that is the real hurt. It\u2019s the employees. It\u2019s a lot of landlords who are going to incur a lot of pain because in exchange for ten-year leases, they put in huge improvements for these spaces which they won\u2019t be able to recapture if WeWork moves out<\/strong>. And you also have a lot of IPOs that will be affected, but I think that\u2019s a good thing \u2014 Peleton\u2019s a great company, but it\u2019s not worth $8 billion. Everyone\u2019s kind of been woken up from their trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In terms of human toll, this is where the real damage starts. This has been a really interesting and romantic story about the fall of Adam Neumann and SoftBank. They\u2019ve got it wrong. Adam Neumann came in, smoked his own supply, and walked out with three-quarters of a billion dollars about the time that people in hazmat suits showed up.<\/strong> It\u2019s like the guy at Chernobyl who refused to believe what was going on was given three-quarters of a billion dollars to leave before shit got real. That\u2019s what happened here. So he and his family will literally have to go into hiding. There will be threats against his life. There\u2019s going to be so much anger here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you want to talk about real toll here \u2014 the real toll is that there\u2019s somewhere between 5,000 and 15,000 WeWork employees who took a job and a big part of their compensation \u2014 the reason they took these jobs was because of equity value. And it\u2019s impossible not to count your money 30 days out from an IPO. It\u2019s impossible to tell your husband to not start looking at houses. <\/strong>It\u2019s impossible not to tell your parents, \u201cLet\u2019s think about going on a family cruise together.\u201d It\u2019s impossible not to start thinking that you can afford that new car. $47 billion? We\u2019re probably talking about several thousand people who were going to be millionaires. Now most of them are probably thinking that in the next 30 days there\u2019s a one-in-two chance I don\u2019t have health insurance. You want to talk about the sheer human toll? The notion that Adam Neumann was fired? My God, he got on the last helicopter out of Saigon<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u2018At What Point Does Malfeasance Become Fraud?\u2019: NYU Biz-School Professor Scott Galloway on WeWork http:\/\/nymag.com\/intelligencer\/2019\/10\/marketing-expert-scott-galloway-on-wework-and-adam-neumann.html How much of the company\u2019s problem was solved when Adam Neumann stepped down? At this point, I would say about none. He and SoftBank entered into a suicide pact, and he jumped out of the plane before it hit the … Continue reading “WeWork meltdown: Adam got the last helicopter out of Saigon”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13803"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13818,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13803\/revisions\/13818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}