[cmsmith]

>Many traditional real estate investors are perplexed by WeWork’s $5 billion valuation. With that kind of money, you could build the world’s most expensive skyscraper—One World Trade Center, which at 3 million square feet has roughly the same cumulative amount of office space as WeWork—and still have $1 billion left over.

I'm as dismissive of ridiculous startup valuations as anyone, but this seemed like a weird way to evaluate whether their value was justified.

For reference, here are a couple of other similar statistics:

* There are about 250M Apple devices in use (100M/yr * 2.5 yr lifespan). At 750B market cap, they're worth $3000 per i____ out there, or enough to buy every one of their users an iPhone and still have $500B left over.

* There are about 200,000 active Uber drivers, and they're valued at $50B. That's $300,000 per driver, or enough to buy every one of their drivers a Tesla and still have $40B left over.

[notahacker]

Isn't the point that unlike high-end manufacturing or online marketplace technology, real estate is a commodity business with competition based on location and fit rather than brand, and owning the assets is where the safest profit is? ($5bn worth of real estate certainly holds its value better than $50bn worth of latest generation Teslas.)

I'd think comparing WeWork - a mid-sized player in a highly competitive workspace space - with the dominance of Apple and Uber is a little fanciful too. As the article points out, Regus (and the Workspace Group, and others) have been doing the same thing successfully on a larger scale for much longer, actually own many of their assets and yet still have smaller market caps. I'm not sure that beer on tap is that much of a defensible business model differentiator for WeWork...