SoftBank has invested more than Bolivia's GDP in WeWork

A leaked meeting recording has been revealed, which shows that SoftBank executive Marcelo Claure, WeWork's new Executive Chairman is telling the startup's staff that SoftBank has invested $18.5 billion in the platform.

He has said he first met SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son after building up his own business, Brightstar - a  cellphone reseller - then selling 57% of it to SoftBank in 2013 in a deal that valued the company at $2.2 billion. SoftBank later acquired more of the company before deciding to explore a sale of the low-margin business last year for $1 billion.

By then, Claure was running Sprint, a SoftBank-backed property that installed Claure as CEO in 2014, where he presided over a massive share slide that began before he joined the company and ended only last year when T-Mobile and Sprint agreed to merge. 

The deal has been green-lit by the FCC and the Department of Justice, but it’s still facing a lawsuit from several state attorneys general who are trying to block the deal, saying it could hamper competition and drive prices higher. Claure stepped away from running the company and into the role of Sprint’s executive chairman in May of last year to become COO of SoftBank. Sprint’s shares have meanwhile held mostly steady for the past year.

As for how WeWork saves the business, that’s not clear yet. One possible hitch that Claure understandably didn’t raise - one in addition to the countless obvious challenges WeWork faces in trying to generate forward momentum, including convincing corporate customers not to look elsewhere for office space - is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S.

SoftBank will seek national security approval from CFIUS for its takeover, and the committee has stymied the Japanese conglomerate before.

It put conditions on SoftBank’s majority ownership of Sprint; it restricted its control of the investment firm Fortress Investment Group, for which it paid $3.3 billion in late 2017; it also held up SoftBank when it wanted to fill two board seats after it sunk billions into Uber. Indeed, SoftBank was never able to fill those spots, noted Bloomberg. Once the ride share company went public, it voided some of its obligations to SoftBank.