WeWork’s Stock Went Down Some More
Also Fed programs, virtual meetings, virtual shareholder meetings, virtual performance reviews and bond ETFs.
The first thing to realize is that, when WeWork’s initial public offering was falling apart last October, when we were mercilessly making fun of WeWork on a daily basis, when it was rapidly running out of money and needed a bailout from its biggest investor, SoftBank Group Corp., when it was pushing out its founder and chief executive officer, Adam Neumann, when it was a hilarious catastrophe and a symbol of the excesses of the startup unicorn boom—those were the good times. Even as I made fun of WeWork’s bad governance and silly behavior and overambitious valuation, it always seemed like a reasonable enough business. Lease office buildings, spruce them up, make them nice, carve them into smaller time-and-space slices, and rent them out by the desk and the month to other businesses for more than you pay. Strip out the blather about WeWork being a new state of consciousness and, you know, seems fine.
Now is the bad time. WeWork is not a unique hilarious catastrophe anymore; it is just a sad catastrophe like so many other businesses. If your city shuts down, if everyone fears the plague, if office workers are told to work from home, no one will be coming to a WeWork, just like no one is going to restaurants or movie theaters.