[fatfingerd]

Seems nuts to me, but CEOs also get an interesting pressure not to effectively be in a second sector through real estate holdings, etc, so even if long term subleasing would have paid off they may not have wanted to.

I guess its that having a lot of assets in a lower alpha sector will dilute the upside in a boom compared to a company that is totally leveraged to have all its value operating in the one sector. Fiscal madness.

[SilasX]

I get that in theory, but this seems like a special case where they'd want to apply some judgment, especially since it requires a massive commitment of upfront capital that FB could almost certainly deploy more efficiently somewhere else.

Like, maybe I'd understand if the payments were due in a slow trickle over time, but article says that FB has already paid the full amount. This would compare to say, taking a small loss each month on the difference between the rent due and what a leasing manager could net from subleases.

(Though I guess 149m is a rounding error to FB.)