Apart from the fact that Marriott has 11.5X as much annual revenue?
Um.. that's one bull case, but the article presents a much stronger case (namely, the one that WeWork itself is making). That is, that WeWork will do to offices what AWS did to servers - make it so the average company never buys physical servers, but rather outsources all of those operations to Amazon.
Analogously, WeWork is imagining a world in which companies never build offices - it's not their core competency, after all. Rather, most companies just get an office at a WeWork instead.
So their potential market is huge - they've only tapped a tiny tiny percentage of "all people who work at a desk".
The analogy would be: Marriott is to Host Hotels as WeWork is to multiple office property owners
Marriott for the most part has transitioned mostly to an all digital company over the past two decades. The Marriott of today is primarily about hotel operations (i.e. branding, bookings/pricing/revpar/SEO, front desk, housekeeping, wifi, remodeling) and its loyalty rewards program and mobile phone app (BonVoy).
Much of its assets have been moved to a standalone REIT that trades under a different ticker. In a way similar to WeWork, Marriott effectively leases hotels from the REIT.
So in that sense, if WeWork can be considered analogous to Marriott, then in a hand wavy way the $47 Billion market cap valuation could somewhat make sense.
The bear case is that its not a well implemented corporate structure full of accounting traps and is actually a fraction of Marriott's valuation...