[kelnos]

The thing that's ironic is that the IPO market likely would have valued WeWork at $10B, maybe even $15B, but since that was so much lower than the $47B valuation it had during SoftBank's earlier investment, they balked and walked.

SoftBank likely would have made out better in the near term had they just let the (disappointing, to them) IPO play out. WeWork would have launched with at least a $10B market cap (though of course that could have dropped on day one), would have raised a couple billion, and maybe would have even raised enough to meet the requirements for the loans they were planning on taking out. But now they've more or less gutted the company, killing anything that was even slightly interesting, turning it more or less into a bog-standard office real estate company. Which presumably will be able to turn a profit after a bit of retooling, but it hardly qualifies as "Vision Fund" material.

This is definitely just Son and SoftBank trying to save face.