Matt Levine, Columnist

WeWork’s Valuation Was for WeWork

Also fake cannabis shares and swine arbitrage.

January 22, 2020 at 12:14 PM EST

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

LEARN MORE

There is, I think, a little bit of a popular misconception about what the banks who led WeWork’s abandoned initial public offering actually did. There seems to be a view that the banks tried to foist WeWork on unsuspecting investors at a $96 billion valuation, and then it only turned out to be worth about $8 billion, and the banks’ overoptimistic valuations exposed their incompetence and also their cynicism; if they’d had their way, they would have tricked investors into overpaying for WeWork by 1,100%.

Here is a comment from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer David Solomon:

Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal

LEARN MORE