They're signing expensive long term leases and then renting them for the short term at a loss, which is like exactly the opposite of how it's supposed to work.
You are confusing unit economic vs profitability. They are very different things.
If I manufacture a widget for $1 and sell it for $.50 then my unit economics are negative and, unless I manage to either lower manufacturing costs or raise prices I am in trouble forever.
If I manufacture a widget for $1 and sell it for $1.50 then my unit economics are positive. My company might still be unprofitable due to other expenses though (R&D, Marketing, whatever). This is the situation that WeWork is in.
I am aware of the difference. If you look at their numbers, their literal unit economics are negative, if you employ normal EBITDA. They don't, they employ a so called "adjusted EBITDA", which last year flatout discounted 150 million in marketing as non-recurring trying to make the argument that you just made.
But this is hilarious number fudging, because obviously a lot of marketing budget is recurring and goes towarss retaining existing customers and should go into a unit cost metric.
They do the same thing that uber did, which is pretending that they can magically 'scale' and that they are a tech company, when in reality they are a real estate business siphoning money out of investors, pretending their losses are somehow magically going to turn into profit.
