Mispriced, opaque private ventures no longer fulfill the tough requirements of initial public offerings (IPOs). The WeWork and Uber bubbles teach us how zero interest rates create too much capital that chases too few sound ventures.
Once upon a time, in private equity land, there was a beautiful unicorn valued at 47 bn $, when in fact it was hardly worth 3 bn. Its charming CEO, its millennial-friendly aesthetics, and the blind trust of the Softbank emperor made everyone in the empire believe the unicorn was a tech-savvy company instead of a common office-space provider. The charming CEO, dreaming of a fortune, would impersonate a tech aristocrat instead of the real estate bourgeois he really was.