[dangerboysteve]

When someone searches for a "Sunk cost fallacy" description in the following years, this will be the example everyone will use.

[adzicg]

Possibly, but there is another angle here. WeWork isn’t really a tech or realestate company, but a financial instrument to be propped up and then dumped into the lap of late investors or the market, so that early investors can run away with a nice profit. The IPO attempt failed. Now they need time for people to forget, so the financial instrument can be repackaged and sold to some gullible private investors a bit later. SoftBank will get new shares significantly cheaper than the older ones, and as long as they can keep the patient on life support long enough for someone else to believe in it, the whole game will pay off nicely. Probably a few years though, waiting for the next wave.

[smachiz]

Except that some percentage of their investment is at a $47B valuation.

They already bought quite a bit of early investors/employees of positions who cashed out happily.

I think this really is about loss mitigation than anything else.

They're already $10B in - spending another $5 to get $10B out vs <$1B out if they go bankrupt is probably worth it.

[dmitrygr]

So basically a dollar auction [1] on a billion dollar scale?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_auction

[dangerboysteve]

I can't see that happening with all this prior history and bad press. But as they say the market is full of suckers.

[api]

People have very short memories. Sketchy debt sausages of the sort that helped cause the 2008 crash are a big thing again.

[havetocharge]

Enriching early investors at the expense of the later ones, is how pyramid schemes work, as well.