WeWork and Counterfeit Capitalism
&gt; WeWork then used this cash to underprice competitors in the co-working space market, hoping to be able to profit later once it had a strong market position in real estate subletting or ancillary businesses.<p>&gt; This is of course Amazon’s model, which underpriced competitors in retail and eventually came to control the whole market.<p>This is wrong, wrong, wrong. The difference is Amazon saw what the marginal costs could be, and had a specific roadmap to drive investment into bringing them down. WeWork fundamentally has no way to drive down the margin on real estate in any meaningful way. Especially as a lessee.<p>&gt; The goal of Son, and increasingly most large financiers in private equity and venture capital, is to find big markets and then dump capital into one player in such a market who can underprice until he becomes the dominant remaining actor. In this manner, financiers can help kill all competition, with the idea of profiting later on via the surviving monopoly.<p>A bold assumption with no citations. There are just as many counterfactuals to this strategy as there are examples. The scooter market is an especially bad  - there is so much capital from so many companies - if you were trying to establish monopolies that would be a bad bet.<p>&gt; Endless money-losing is a variant of counterfeiting, and counterfeiting has dangerous economic consequences. The subprime fiasco was one example.<p>The subprime crisis is completely unrelated! And if anything it was proof that <i>money-making</i> assets should be scrutinized more.<p>WeWork is a garbage, charlatan company. But don&#x27;t misunderstand what is happening here.