It’s been quite hilarious for me watching this saga unfold. All I needed to hear was that this man literally took out loans from WeWork and used the proceeds of the loans to purchase real estate that he then leased back to WeWork. Lol!
Ouch. :)
Also forfeiture doesn't account for the fact that you may have paid capital gains tax. I feel like they really shafted me on that one.
I was sentenced in March of 2018 and self-surrendered at FCI Morgantown on May of 2018. I participated in the residential program and left in May of 2019. I am fully released in October of 2019. I currently live at the halfway house. You need an ankle monitor to go on home confinement and my place of employment is not compatible with an ankle monitor. Unfortunately, the BOP requires you to pay 25% of your gross income to the halfway house while you reside there.
Edit: I can't edit my original comment. I'd also like to add that Matt Levine's wife works at the Federal Defenders of NY office.
Alice says to you, right up front, “I need to make one billion dollars, or I look for a different partner.”
Are you going to accuse Alice of being greedy, when your entire business consists of making money? You don’t cure the sick, or bring the Internet to rural communities, or manufacture safe transportation, or serve healthy food. You just make money.
So you say, “Fine, Alice, but a billion dollars is a lot of money.” Alice says, “How much do you need to make, such that my dream can come true?”
So you work out how you can make ten billion, while Alice makes one billion.
Now the conversation becomes, “How does Alice take her one billion out of the business, tweaking the knobs for risk, tax advantage, estate planning, and so forth?”
You bought into Alice making a billion dollars, so everything else is just details about when she gets the various bits of her billion.
But its purpose is NOT to police self-dealing. And the people putting the money in are exactly the people who are directly responsible for governance.
Likewise, due to regulatory capture, the people who put money into businesses are closely related to the people who write laws about what is or isn’t legal, and enforce those laws.
So if Adam’s choices are ok with his investors, they are going to be structured in such a way that they are perfectly legal.
The bottom line:
If Adam provides an opportunity for his investors to make their “ten billion,” why would anyone object to his self-dealing?
Why do we, for that matter?
What crime is being committed, if everything is disclosed? What puritanical streak runs through us that we object to his leasing his own buildings back to his business on moral grounds?
Either he follows through and makes his investors rich, or he doesn’t. I have opinions about that, but at the end of the day, that is all that matters to his financiers, which is why he so-called “got away with it.”
And the things that were unwound were only unwound because they impacted the likelihood of his investors making money. It had nothing to do with crimes being committed or moral turpitude.
What you mistake for loathing is actually me putting money in black and white. Money is neutral. It’s not good, it’s not evil. What people do or don’t do to make it is good or evil. What people do with it is good or evil.
Leasing your trademarks to an entity you own? That’s just shuffling money around. It’s not evil and not a crime. It may affect somebody’s calculations about whether they want to buy a stock, but that’s exactly what the S-1 is for.
On the other hand, why would anyone care whether or not his investors make their “ten billion”?
We object because it’s a you-scratch-our-back-we-scratch-yours situation in which the rich get richer and no value is produced for the rest of society.
But my parent comment was responding to the question of whether this specific behaviour is illegal. Your take touches on whether the entire industry—with or without a few leasebacks and trademark deals—is morally repugnant.
Does it?
There’s one aspect of some sort of ethical wrongness because I suspect there’s an eventual chump who will lose out not having full perspective when this thing falls apart.
But, for me, I have a tendency to feel uncomfortable when things are “obviously” wrong. I find it curious about me, and I’ve met others, who just don’t like it when things are off. The simple act of making the world more correct is pleasing. I’ve found it pretty helpful in debugging and system design. I find it really annoying in domains where there isn’t really an objective right and wrong, or it’s not clear to me what’s right, or where they aren’t fixable. And it’s pretty common in politics or religion where people point out wrongs.
So I don’t think money or technology is neutral. I think they both as information have certain innate needs to grow in the most efficient way possible. Money is like a river trying to flow to the ocean and actions like We took and is taking are the equivalent of trying to build a harbor in shallow water or some other illogical act.
And I think it's valid to use that to make predictions about the company's viability and/or make predictions about the likely outcome of any private or public stock market investment.
Choosing whether to do business with someone who fully discloses their past choices and is truthful about their future plans is a whole different thing from judging whether their past choices are criminal and/or dishonest.
Unless it is revealed that they are withholding other relevant transactions, I'd say the man is honest. But "honest" is not synonymous with, "someone I want to do business with."
...but it's hard to care.
(i.e. the 'great' thing about this is that it makes being the founder completely risk-free, you make millions even if your firm craters)
Maybe we should just not have anyone worth a billion dollars.
Probably. Investors were amply aware of Adam’s self dealing. It was abundantly disclosed, and they accepted it as part of their investment.
Their wager was the self dealing was a fair cost to pay for WeWork’s growth. They didn’t count on public equity investors being a savvy bunch.
There will almost certainly be lawsuits, but the only moves that look like they crossed clear lines one can’t disclose oneself out of were those involving his hiring his family members. But again, probably a civil dispute by someone turned down for a promotion or similar job.