The blame for this falls solely on the laughable prospectus they issued ahead of the IPO. I was relieved that everyone in the finance world appeared to call it for what it is.

While I hope the BOJ and the Japanese taxpayer aren't on the hook for Softbank's hubris (not just with WeWork but also Oyo and Uber), I am glad that pension and mutual funds won't have any exposure to this flaming pile of garbage.

A lot of businesses will hide their failure under the pandemic. This is really bad, since people with wrong business models in upside trends, will get access to benefits and help in downside periods by having an excuse for their failure, encouraging ineffective business models.

In this case, I don't think anybody is fooled.

Foodora just sort of did this with their announcement of exiting the Canadian market. That combined with the labour action they faced, though they were even somewhat publicly mum about that one.

Not really. Their thesis disintegrated way before this. Their thesis was that that even in a market with weak network effects, customer acquisition costs are high enough that you can spend your way into such a dominant mindshare that you end up with monopolistic or oligopolistic returns. The thesis is basically trashed at this point. The upfront costs are too high and the mindshare dominance is too fragile.