Maybe the Robots Will Give Everyone Free Stuff

This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

I half-joked the other day that “WeWork’s business model is getting SoftBank to buy beer for software workers,” but of course that basic idea—rapidly growing a business by selling its products below cost, subsidized by huge venture-capital investments, in the hopes of one day flipping to profitability once you’ve achieved scale—is pretty standard in Silicon Valley. There are, for instance, many who believe that Uber Technologies Inc.’s product is a below-cost taxi service subsidized by tens of billions of dollars of venture-capital funding.