Jay Clayton’s people come to the conclusion that this IPO market might not be technically criminal, but it is certainly very extremely dumb.
The WeWork IPO will go down in financial history like a Viking song, a ballad of madness and pain and foolish gods who brought around their own demise. Our children’s children will talk of “co-working as culture private equity” like we talk about “bundled mortgage-backed securities.”*
So breathtakingly batshit is the tainted love of Adam Neumann and Masayoshi Son that it seems to have laid bare to all just how out-of-control stupid the global private equity scene has become. The fallout from the Dada surrealism of Neumann being paid $1.7 billion to walk away from something worth $8 billion after he spent $19 billion to make everyone believe it was worth $47 billion is so mindbendingly absurd that Wall Street appears genuinely disgusted and borderline-fascists are tweeting about their sudden interest in socialism.