A very succinct recap of what went down. It looks in one way as if a single company was acting like the mortgage-bundling funds that created much of the 2008 bubble that burst. So it sort of looks like a house of cards.
Except how did this guy convince the head of Softbank to invest so much money? He must be a gifted bullshitter.
And it’s the greed pheromone, so seductive.
One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got came from the big boss of the publishing company I worked for in the 90s, which owned newspapers, TV stations and book publishing. This guy was a heavy hitter: he had been the head of ABC in New York for 17 years. He told me when I was just starting out that in reporting up to your boss or an investor, “always lead with your bad news. That way your good news will be believed. If you always lead with your good news, it becomes suspect.”
I suspect that this is a guy who didn’t do that; did the opposite in fact. But in those pre-IPO filings, you have to lay it out honestly or you are committing a crime. So, the whole picture came suddenly into full focus. “Whoops…so that’s what’s going on? No thanks, we’ll pass.”