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© 2019 AFPHard landing for SoftBank? WeWork meltdown raises questions
By Toshifumi Kitamura TOKYO©2025 GPlusMedia Inc.
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© 2019 AFP
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JeffLee
that's if you stake your faith in paper profits based on Softbank's own numbers. Its 47 bil. valuation of WeWork, to cite one example, is regarded by any sane and knowledgeable person as a mind-boggling joke.
Jonathan Prin
Too easy to make money out of thin air.
ozellis
When Son took over Vodafone everyone said he was crazy. Same when he challenged NTT with an ADSL service. Both brilliant moves.
WeWork may indeed turn out to be a poor investment and I personally do not understand it but you just never know. FWIW, the people I know who actually use wework, love it.
Uber is underwater but that is the future or at least some version of it.
Flipkart, ARM, Slack, Yahoo, Guardant Health, etc have all been great for Softbank.
If you are an investor and can tolerate some risk, you could do a lot worse.
chloe Koba
Softbank is run by super dumb people and all their investments are going to be losses, hiring fake MBAs at high salary does not ensure or run businesses.Ditto for Rakuten
TARA TAN KITAOKA
Time will tell.
justasking
Typical Japanese way of thinking. Just because he made some mistakes in some of his investments, as any other successful investors in the entire world has done, doesn’t mean he’s going down. Japanese minds don’t understand this. That’s why they don’t take risks and pulls down anyone who stands out - like Son.
mmwkdw
The larger you grow, the more responsibility you pass off onto others... the worry is, how do you know that you can trust them to do the due diligence that you would have personally carried out yourself ?
JeffLee
Son apparently made his multi-billion decision on wework after a 12-minute pitch. How's that for due diligence? The issue is double-layered in this fiasco, according to many insiders.