Shira Ovide, Columnist

WeWork and SoftBank Live in Their Own World

In a reality far, far away, they alone control how the young company is funded, operated and valued.

Welcome to Planet X.

Photographer: Keith Bedford/Bloomberg
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Two people believe fervently, wholeheartedly in WeWork Cos., which leases real estate to commercial tenants and also bathes in self-parody. They are Adam Neumann, WeWork’s co-founder and CEO, and Masayoshi Son, the boss of SoftBank Group Corp. Let those two have each other. The rest of us should get on with our lives.

The fresh news is that SoftBank plans to commit $2 billion more toward WeWork1— scaled back from what was discussed as a $16 billion investment that could have left SoftBank as the sole outside stockholder in the young company. That massive potential deal was met with resistance from the investors in SoftBank’s nearly $100 billion technology investment fund. I should say that $2 billion is still a lot of money to plow into a rapidly growing but wildly unprofitable young company whose headline valuation is many times that of established peers.