[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...