There’s a saying that “old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” You could apply that to a bunch of money-losing companies in the (very broadly defined) tech sector that are still hanging around such as Lyft, Bird Global and BuzzFeed. But the best example would have to be WeWork, which has deflated like a blowup swimming pool with a puncture since going public in the fall of 2021. Today, its stock dropped 25%, which admittedly isn’t as meaningful as it sounds, as it closed on Tuesday at 35 cents. More significantly, WeWork shares, now trading around a quarter apiece, have dropped 98% since their public debut.
The catalyst for the latest sell-off was Tuesday’s news that Sandeep Mathrani, the real estate veteran who took over as CEO three years ago, is to exit next week. He follows Bruce Dunlevie, the venture capitalist who had been WeWork’s lead independent director, who quit last week. Both exits would make anyone nervous, given WeWork’s cash bleed. In the first quarter alone, the company burned $343 million. That’s on top of $5.6 billion it burned between 2020 and 2022. More fundamentally, though, WeWork has not exactly delivered the numbers it projected when it announced its plan to go public via a SPAC merger in March 2021.
