We Has Decided to Make Money

I have probably spent as much time as anyone on earth making fun of WeWork, so now, for variety, I think I am going to pivot to being a wild-eyed WeWork bull. To be fair, I have always had sort of a soft spot for the business model. The business model is, like, you rent a building, you divide it into a lot of small offices and individual workstations, and you rent the pieces out to customers for more than you pay to rent the building. It is not insane to think that that would work, and while WeWork’s financial disclosures were never exactly a model of clarity, it was not even really insane to think that it did work, that WeWork was basically able to do exactly that trade when it put its mind to it, though it was never profitable because it chose instead to funnel all of its money into opening new buildings. But it always said that would change, and why not? Last September, as WeWork’s initial public offering was going poorly, but before it was pulled in disgrace, I wrote:

Well, after I wrote that, events occurred that might cause you to have some doubts. For instance, after the IPO was pulled in October, WeWork more or less immediately needed a giant bailout from SoftBank; it turned out that huge frequent cash infusions were not just a nice-to-have way to boost growth but a necessity to keep WeWork going. And then the coronavirus happened, people stopped going to work, open shared offices in particular became less attractive, and the WeWork model seemed a bit doomed.