I somehow think that Horowitz wouldn't want to hear my honest evaluation of Adam Neumann: He found a set of idiots with money (chiefly Andreesen Horowitz and Softbank) and saw them making dumb trades, so he found a way to put himself on the other side of those trades. To do this, he constructed an "audacious" but ultimately fundamentally dumb business that he could wrap in VC shibboleths, whose principal goal was to collect VC money and funnel it into his pocket. In a way, he is a brilliant exploiter of people like Horowitz.

I mean, if he fails his own test, that’s his problem but the test is the correct one.

Agreed. Anyone can create a company which raises a ton of money and feeds 90% of it back to itself as revenue.

I don't think that anyone can do this, at all. I think there's a totally different skillset than it takes to actually run a business than to get money from VCs, and by stripping away the need for that skillset, Adam Neumann really perfected his VC grift game. That doesn't mean that he wasn't exceptionally skilled at it.

I’m not sure the evaluation above is “fair”. “Positive” would be a better term

People never like to be told they’re mugs

I suspect it’s more self-serving and they just want to weed out people that would have moral qualms about making gobs of money with a white elephant.

But IS this a fair valuation? Was his glamour and charisma really all there was to it?