This was always the weird thing about WeWork, after the collapse of it's ridiculous valuation people were like "Well, it's still a business, similar to IWG, it has some value". But the truth is no, the only thing WeWork had was a series of liabilities. They had signed a bunch of agreements to rent office space long term at a high price. The valuable part of IWG is that they have rental agreements with buildings that are low cost and they rent that space out to businesses for more money. That's how they make money. But WeWork didn't have that, at best they had expensive leases they needed to walk away from and some potential customer demand that is elastic enough that it'd go to 0 when they started charging above their own costs.

The article makes out like WeWork lost 47Bn over the last 5 years. No! It was probably worth 0 when the first IPO blew up. The only thing that kept it alive was Japanese face saving.