Neumann, the founder of WeWork, will walk away from this corporate bonfire with a billion dollars and a bunch of fancy houses. His great-grandchildren will be prominent philanthropists with their names on museums and universities, the strange origin of their fortunes long forgotten. Neumann did a certain sort of capitalism—one with some cachet at HBS!—as well as anyone has ever done it. It is one thing to build a successful company that creates a lot of value and take some of that value for yourself; Neumann created a company that destroyed value at a blistering pace and nonetheless extracted a billion dollars for himself. He lit $10 billion of SoftBank’s money on fire and then went back to them and demanded a 10% commission. What an absolute legend.As a friend I spent time with last week at a small reunion used to say, "Hey, when did I fall off the fast track?"
Betting against mistakes
I'm liking this guy Matt Levine, who writes for Bloomberg:
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3 comments:
I figure that, since I have never lost ANY of SoftBank's money, they probably owe me 5 or 10 billion dollars.
That's true. Our track record is $10B better than his.
If it is a real bank, they merely squeezed 10b out of interest payments through loaning fiat currency to people. Basically a sort of corporate wage slave contract.
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