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Comment by lend000 | Hacker News Reader

> It was obvious to everyone that WeWork was going to flop

Always easy to say this so confidently in hindsight, but did you or anyone you know become a millionaire shorting WeWork after it went public?

Wag, I get. But I was bullish on the idea of WeWork and the model until the founder's corruption and mismanagement started getting major attention.

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You can't short a company that never went public. I think there were enough skeptics though that would have raked in a few million when it's valuation dropped from $40+ Billion to wherever it's at now.

Of course now everyone claims to have seen it for what it was from the start.

Someone—not me, probably not you, but someone—could have made money buying credit default swaps on WeWork debt.

Definitely not me. WeWork was barely on my radar as a thing until the last exorbitant round of funding, to which my reaction was, "seems high, but I don't know much about their market competition or growth prospects." Though it took very little time at all after that for it to look sketchy: CEO paying himself to sell his work product, as CEO, back to the company was a bit of a sign that mass value extraction and/or strip mining was taking place.

Precisely. Hindsight is very 20/20. Although about 5 years ago I visited their office as a student and was quite curious to hear they had a multi billion dollar valuation and only a handful of office spaces...

(Un)fortunately WeWork didn’t go public!

WeWork never went public, they failed at their IPO that's when everything unwinded.

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