They are focusing on self dealing by Neumann. Can’t wait to read about it from Matt Levine.
It’s amazing to see this story keep on developing apparently after it was all supposed to be said and done when he left the company.
Watch Succession instead. Its way stronger and has what I liked about Billions Season 1 while also being better
Even if there were no legal basis for the investigation it would likely still happen because it is such a massive political win that even if the AG was too dumb to take it up on their own accord the AG's boss would strongly suggest an investigation be opened.
Just to be clean I'm not defending Neuman/WeWork definitely did wrong and I think the statutes around securities fraud are broad enough to nail them, just that the technical legality is a footnote compared to the other motivators here. It should be obvious why this kind of prosecution is a politician's wet dream (and make no mistake, a state AG is a politician, just not an elected one) regardless of whether there's clear law violation or not.
Government doesn't swing into action like this because it's morally right or whatever (it may be morally right, but that is tangential). It swings into action because there are stakeholders to please and it's rare to have two big stakeholder groups aligned like this.
WeWork has employees in New York. Many exercised stock options. Many are about to be laid off and start filing for unemployment benefits.
Make that three groups the AG can potentially please.
Win^3 is way better than win^2
Too bad we don't get all around wins like this more often.
And from Scott Galloway ( https://www.profgalloway.com ) :)
Very interesting as what I understood was that, technically (SEC, SOX, whatever...), nothing of what Neumann did went against the rules, but maybe in this case the actions will be compared to the "spirit" of the (aggregated) rules?
EDIT: and I guess that Softbank would be happy if Neumann would somehow lose shares/votes.
What have you read that gave you that impression?