<story><title>The Fall of WeWork</title><url>https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/inside-the-fall-of-wework</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>The real question is, why is the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund such a huge source of dumb money? They propped up WeWork. They propped up Uber. To some end, or just through sheer dumbness?&lt;p&gt;None of this could happen without a huge source of dumb money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tracer4201</author><text>Diversification.&lt;p&gt;I don’t mean to generalize, but there’s a aspect to Saudi culture where they look at down upon people who work - regardless of whether you’re a doctor or a rocket scientist - they look down upon folks who work for a living as if they’re lesser people.&lt;p&gt;In that micro culture, you cannot rely on your own population for economic output. You rely on foreigners or you directly invest in foreign companies and hope to find the next Amazon, Microsoft, or something like that.&lt;p&gt;Source - I married right after high school and my first husband (15 years older) worked in Saudi Arabia. I went there to live with him. We lived together there for 3 years. I eventually left him because I didn’t want to be in a cage (at least that’s what it was like to live there as a female) and wanted to go to school and have my own career and freedom.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Fall of WeWork</title><url>https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/11/inside-the-fall-of-wework</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Animats</author><text>The real question is, why is the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund such a huge source of dumb money? They propped up WeWork. They propped up Uber. To some end, or just through sheer dumbness?&lt;p&gt;None of this could happen without a huge source of dumb money.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>seibelj</author><text>Investing $10 billion responsibly across a lot of private companies is hard work. Gotta find the companies, negotiate, join the board, monitor them, be apprised of the goings-ons. Then you find a company that can plausibly take $10billion in one go and return the same as any other tech company, plus by giving them so much capital they can destroy the competition.&lt;p&gt;It really comes down to easy-money policies of central bankers combined with the laziness of investors. So much money to invest and doing hard work is for suckers who don’t have the connections to get the capital to invest.</text></comment>