> How does anyone justify WeWork as a tech company?

Straight from the horse's mouth (We Co's S-1 Filing, pg.2):

"Technology is at the foundation of our global platform. Our purpose-built technology and operational expertise has allowed us to scale our core WeWork space-as-a-service offering quickly, while improving the quality of our solutions and decreasing the cost to find, build, fill and run our spaces. We have approximately 1,000 engineers, product designers and machine learning scientists that are dedicated to building, integrating and automating the complex systems we use to operate our business. As a result, we are able to deliver a premium experience to our members at a lower price relative to traditional alternatives."

Of course their filings make them sound like a unicorn. Their engineering was a marketing point not a core product. I’ve got a bridge to sell you...based on something something machine learning scientists and engineering. Did we mentioned we are losing 2 billion and making our founder enormously rich?

Yup, precisely right. They marketed the business as a tech company, hoping that future investors would overlook years of unprofitability to get in on the next rapidly-growing tech company.

Oh don't worry about those losses, we're the next Amazon. Except bigger than Amazon, because we're not just a company, but a "state of consciousness." btw did I tell you our CEO is going to become the world's first trillionaire? It's all amazing news and I hope you join our family

"Tech" is a proxy for low marginal production cost per customer, i.e. moon potential. If you want to get risk-tolerant investors excited, first convince them you're Tech. The rest of the investors will jump on board when it looks like you're winning.

WeWork seems to me like a real estate management group