That vision has been clipped now, before we ever saw a chance to see it finish playing out. If part of their valuation was future potential, then I agree they were worth more while trying to be something new, than they are as just a real estate shell.

It's becoming pretty clear that neither Uber nor Netflix have that. Uber's biggest costs are drivers, marketing and regulatory issues which keep piling up. Netflix biggest asset appears to be original content as the platform itself has plenty of competition, and costs for content seem to go up linearly.

WeWork seems to just rent out real estate and at least on the surface it does not look like tech is defining fundamentally how they do it.

Uber services opportunities that couldn't be serviced by traditional taxi companies (on demand, low latency rides).

Which makes the crux of these businesses "Does your technology create enough additional, currently-unserved demand to hit your growth targets?"

Wework not so much it seems

But no, Netflix is no longer special there - Their tech is tried and true, the problems are still interesting but well solved. They ceased being a tech player... five years ago?

That being said, only a small percentage of their market cap is related to their technology. They could outsource the whole thing to BAMTech and it probably wouldn't affect them much.

But they are currently innovating massively in machine learning and other data analytics. They are also innovating in "Hollywood tech".

Hollywood still uses old tech to move from capturing the actors performance to putting it in front of viewers. They mostly still track their assets with Excel (or on paper!).

Netflix can get a show from filming to viewers a lot faster than most of Hollywood can.

I bet I could find that exact sentence used somewhere to justify wework as a "tech company".

This is how monopolies are started.