Ehh, of all the industries that exist in the world, I find it pretty unlikely that the office space industry is going to be monopolized by a company that is price dumping, and that this is going to put everyone else in the office space industry out of business.

Fair point. Given their business model, it seems like the whole segment of co-working (renting long term leases and reselling as short term ones) never really made sense to begin with. (Despite it being to many people's advantage, including myself).

I wonder if it has more of a place in a post Covid world? At least some companies are interested in divesting themselves of office space and going 100% remote. A flexible office space arrangement or even just a small space that can be rented to meet with clients sounds like it could be useful.

I'd say they aren't enforced because they are really vague and thus hard to enforce, and if they weren't, all sorts of things would be different and weird. For instance Google might not exist (the search engine) because for the first few years of its life it was basically giving the web search engine away for free and hoping to make money by selling search appliances for intranets. That business plan didn't work out and they eventually pivoted to making money on the main search engine.

But what if they'd not been allowed to do this and been forced to charge for web search from day one? With no ad network and without being allowed to take VC money to build up traffic, they'd not have been able to establish a market for ads and thus, would have had to rely entirely on revenue from search appliances, which was tiny. Search would have ended up dominated by their competitors simply because they could never bootstrap themselves to the point where they'd be interesting to advertisers.

So this stuff is complex and even though there seems to clearly be a problem here with VC money subsidising broken businesses forever that suck all the oxygen out of the room, it's unclear that governments effectively setting prices is better (after all, setting price floors is a form of price control). SoftBank will eventually run out of money unless Son finds another Alibaba. Government controls don't run out like that.

> unless Son finds another Alibaba. Government controls don't run out like that.

Thanks, you made me think. You might be right. An unsubstantiated part of me wants to think that oil being pegged to the dollar and the dollar being pegged to nothing is the ultimate root cause. What allows western aligned funds like Softbank to accumulate so much mis-managed money that WeWork is even a thing. I feel like this whole thing will collapse and Bitcoin will look honest in comparison.

Well, oil is traded in dollars but not pegged to it. To be pegged to it, there'd have to be a constant oil price but the price floats freely.

SoftBank is something of an aberration caused by the growth of China. Son would have lost all his wealth in the first dotcom bubble but he sprayed so much money around he got in on Alibaba early, and it turned into the Chinese Amazon. Or at least, that's the uncharitable view. The charitable view is that placing a lot of bets on a lot of firms and hoping one gets huge is a perfectly valid strategy to create wealth, and Son reaped the rewards. However, the risk involved is huge. Lots of people lost lots in the dot com bubble because they sprayed money around and did not find that magic lottery ticket.