[Traster]

Wework and softbank are interesting because they pretty much show you the limits of private equity and tech disruption. Wework was so far away from technology it was fascinating to see the story around it and how it ran its business. Softbank is really interesting because of their role, the unique position its in because of how deep its pockets are, and how the timing of WeWork's story has interacted with SoftBank's raising for the Vision fund. If you want to see how crazy things in PE can go, you can make a good argument that you should be looking at Softbank - with their positions in ARM, uber, Alibaba, Boston Dynamics, Slack, Wag. I mean, we can have an entire conversation about Wag.

But also, this story isn't over. This story has been almost an unmitigated catastrophe for the last year and yet this news is telling you that Softbank think that WeWork is currently still the most valuable company in the office rental space despite everything. It also tells you softbank isn't just funded a tonne of companies and are willing to let them go big or collapse - they don't seem able to walk away from WeWork. The reason this is interesting is because this is now raising big red flags about how Softbank's investment portfolio is looking - and it'll be interesting when we hear whether they start to suffer because of it.