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Businesses The Almighty Buck Technology

WeWork To Go Public Via SPAC At Significantly Reduced Valuation of $9 Billion (cnbc.com) 24

phalse phace shares a report from CNBC: WeWork has agreed to go public through a merger with blank-check firm BowX Acquisition Corp in a deal that values the office-sharing startup at $9 billion including debt. It marks a steep drop from the $47 billion that WeWork was valued for a listing in 2019, ahead of a botched listing plan that imploded due to investor concerns over its business model and its founder Adam Neumann's management style.

Back then Goldman Sachs bankers had said the valuation could hit as much as $65 billion, but instead it plummeted to roughly $8 billion after SoftBank was forced to extend a life-saving financing lifeline to WeWork. The startup told prospective investors it lost about $3.2 billion last year as part of a pitch for a stock market listing by merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), sources told Reuters earlier this week.

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WeWork To Go Public Via SPAC At Significantly Reduced Valuation of $9 Billion

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  • At first I was pretty down on WeWork, or any shared working space as a viable concern going forward...

    However after some thought I've come around to shared working spaces being more valuable than before, not less.

    Sure people are leaving offices in droves, many to work from home basically forever. That means a lot of offices closing down.

    But there still is the need or at least desire for some In-person meetings at times - and that is where WeWork can be more valuable than before, by offering really good tem

    • by Burdell ( 228580 )

      But wasn't a lot of their value tied up in commercial real estate holdings that may have already been over-valued? Lots more people working from home is going to crash the office space real estate market hard. Every landlord is going to be setting up shared/temporary work spaces, conference rooms for rent by the hour, etc.

    • > But there still is the need or at least desire for some In-person meetings at times - and that is where WeWork can be more valuable than before, by offering really good temporary meeting spaces.

      You dont need an office for an in person meeting, there are many alternatives, like a coffee shop, park, people might even get some fresh air and needed exercise.
      THe only people who want togo back to the office are people who have been shown to be useless parasites who contribute basically nothing to the bu
      • Nobody is going to go to a meeting in the park you dimwit, there are no whiteboards or donuts and you get shat on by pigeons, assuming it's not pouring rain.
        • > Nobody is going to go to a meeting in the park you dimwit, there are no whiteboards or donuts and you get shat on by pigeons, assuming it's not pouring rain.
          Wow so you would rather waste 10 - 20 hours a week commuting for a free donut or two. Im sorry but i value my time, and i wouldnt trade it for the grand prize of a donut or two in a meeting.
          Yeh because it rains every day and pidgeons never stop shitting, what a complete lying loser you are, no wonder you need to have meetings with those other l
      • You dont need an office for an in person meeting, there are many alternatives, like a coffee shop, park

        I've done meetings in both locations before and they kind of suck, mostly because of the noise factor - even parks can be pretty noisy.

        Coffee shops can also be extremely variable as to being able to get any seating or space enough for all the people.

    • Sure people are leaving offices in droves, many to work from home basically forever. That means a lot of offices closing down. But there still is the need or at least desire for some In-person meetings at times - and that is where WeWork can be more valuable than before, by offering really good temporary meeting spaces. So if I were them I'd double down on conference room space and quality [...]

      I work remote, but I rent an office rather than work from home. You check around here and you'll find some people who, while they don't want to go back to "the office", don't necessarily want to work from home, either. In the area where I work, we've added a couple of people who are the same way--they love that they don't have to do an hour commute anymore, but they don't necessarily have or want to make space at home for an office and/or have to deal with interruptions from spouses, kids, dogs, cats, par

    • by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Yeah but anyone owning a commercial building can offer that direct and cut out the utterly pointless middleman. The reality is, wework was all about datamining small business silly enough to trust them, this managed be controlling the computer network those small business access, every one of their commercial ideas data mined. It was a pretty crooked idea and privacy laws killed it.

      So I still do not get the idea where a corporation is worth triple its LOSSES, like what the fuck, ohh the banksters and PR and

    • Why the hell would I pay.some profit-making vaporscam company for that?

      Like we ain't got our own places to meet up...
      Like we can't have our own shared offices.
      Journalists have been doing that for decades.
      And unlike this, it was actually a cost-*reduction* measure.
      Get together, rent some office space together, use shared facilities, save money, exchnge tips at the coffe machine.
      You even got a special journalist insurance that saved you tons of money.
      I know because my dad did that, back in the 80s and 90s.

  • Oh boy! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 26, 2021 @07:27PM (#61203092)

    A SPAC for a REIT with a history of fraud that probably isn't going to pay dividends like an ordinary REIT. Even better, it specializes in office space and we're in a pandemic that's caused more people to work from home, creating a glut of office space. Take my money!

  • Setting up another crash are they?

    • So they can also crash with it themselves... looking at their past financial mass murder... ^^

      Is there a word for when somebody is so greedy, that he would wound himself just to wound others, financially, by the way? Gold Man-Sacksing?

  • Why are they worth anything in the first place ?
    • Time will tell, might not be, Regus was profitable on a smaller more select locations. WeWork have property leases that might turn a profit some day. Risky. WHy? (+1) AlexHilbertRyan 9 minutes ago Why are they worth anything in the first place ?
    • They aren't.

      Why are you implying they are?

      Don't assuming things are true, just because somebody said them. Especially scammers / corporates / politicians / ....
      Kids usually only do that until the age of 7. And then they start to grow into actual individuals. Which is called "maturity".
      Yes, that has sadly become quite rare. 30 year old toddlers everywhere, including me back then. But once you know, you're able to change that.

      Let's try it out:
      If they an declare things a reality, to make them become a reality,

  • by Pollux ( 102520 ) <`speter' `at' `tedata.net.eg'> on Friday March 26, 2021 @09:10PM (#61203512) Journal

    For those of you who've never heard before, a SPAC is short for "Special Purpose Acquisition Company". It's a "financial instrument" used to make a company public without all the regulations of an IPO. It's become the latest craze to launch a startup company as quickly as possible into public trading.

    These things should not be legal, but because the finance industry continues to "innovate" before government can intervene, no one's shut them down yet. Everyone should watch this video [youtube.com] to get a full explanation of how scummy they really are.

    • The market is very frothy at the moment, so anyone remotely wanting to go public wants to do so before the froth loses all the air. Hence SPAC's are everywhere.
  • When all the wework dwelling companies are pulling there leases because they don't need office space when everyone's work from home.
    • Pre-pandemic, when many people "worked from home" they were never at home. They went somewhere to use a desk. If WFH continues, I imagine there's a huge need for someplace for people to go work.

  • This will end as well as those who gave money to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.
  • The scam died. Nobody cares. Go back to Silicon Valley.

  • and before you know it...

All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities. -- Dawkins

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