WeWork is reportedly slow-playing its IPO, borrowing $4B first

Disrupt the 1st person plural... The We Company has visionary visions to turn real estate into utopias, starting with its WeWork office spaces. It's already stealthily filed to IPO, but the WSJ just reported that it's first taking a pit stop with the banks to borrow $4B. Achieve goal #1 of the IPO now so it's better ready for goal #2 later:

• Goal #1: Raise money. With the IPO, We planned to create millions of new shares of itself to sell to the public for cash.
• Goal #2: Go public. All of We's investors (We founders, We venture capitalists, We employees) have We shares that are just pieces of paper. When it's a public company, it becomes easy to sell those shares for cash.

A $47B cash-burning machine... WeWork's biz model calls for a ton of spending. Right now, it's hugely unprofitable (it lost $1.9B last year — that's more than the $1.8B it generated in revenue). Here's how WeWork happens:

1. It signs leases for huge office buildings.
2. It WeWorkifies them by optimizing dead workspaces and cutting them into different sized, rentable pieces (small enough for one woman entrepreneurs, big enough for Amazon). Then it tosses in draft lager taps and ironic wallpaper.
3. It collects rent from WeWork tenants.