David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…So, interestingly you pointed on that $19.19 number. That strike price, if you go back to the last time that the stock was valued around there, you brought this up earlier it was around $20.14, which was around the time when WeWork had about 1000 employees, so 14,000 of the 15,000 employees have been issued stock options that are underwater. It’s what we think. As we discussed before the show, there’s a 409A Valuation, which is what shares are really valued at and that’s different than the official price. So, it’s possible that there’s another 1000 in it. Even if you’re slightly in the money, there are taxes on top of this. You weren’t expecting this, so a lot of people might not have exercised options. If you deal with this stuff, you realize that if you haven’t exercised your options, you’re actually paying a higher tax rate than people did who did a year ago. I have been told that there were certain people who got actual stock grants, which is different than options, just were handed stock basically free in lieu of cash. I doubt that was very much. If that existed, those people in the money. Look. No. Most people who’ve joined WeWork in the last couple of years, who, a couple of months ago honestly might have been taking our mortgages, might have been taking our loans. Why wouldn’t you? You got a $49 billion company. Any bank would loan against that, or at least loan something against that. There are two things. They get nothing out of that financially and thousands of them are literally going to be out of work. They get nothing for their stock and they don’t even have paychecks. They’ll get some severance, but not much. There’s a couple of more points to this deal. The $5 million loan to Adam personally from SoftBank Corp off of their freaking balance sheet.…

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