What's the deal with WeWork?

How does WeWork get a $4.7 Billion valuation? Are investors idiots? It's nothing but office building leases with short term sublets. What's the barrier to entry? How do they support the rents you need to make $4.7 Billion?

WorldCom and Enron were bad, but at least they were defrauding with new technologies and/or new regulatory regimes. Smart crooks can always exploit new stuff, but WeWork is just buildings.  What's wrong with the financial system that this stuff happens?

mm

what i find more disturbing is , the ousted CEO/Founder is getting close to a 1.5 billion $ buyout..

The biggest part of the buy out was to buy back his stock, so that goes back to the high valuation. Most of the rest was a line of credit. The crazy part was a $140 million consulting contract. Why would you do that? What can he do for that much money?

With all that money flying around, it seems like I shudda been able to grab some of it, but that never happened.

mm

Yeah
It makes no sense.
They should have started a taxi company but convinced their employees to use their own vehicles and the regulators to let them by cloaking the whole thing in tech-y Internet lingo. Or maybe something similar but with vacation rentals.

 .Com 2.0

Milo Maltbie wrote

. Smart crooks can always exploit new stuff, but WeWork is just buildings.  

This is my big question about it. It's just... a real estate company? That won't pay a nice dividend like a REIT? And its (former?) CEO is a maniac scam artist?

No thanks.