Following a final hearing on its bankruptcy plan Thursday morning, the coworking pioneer will have fewer locations, a new influx of capital, and 4 billion in debt wiped from its books. In a packed courtroom in Newark, New Jersey, Judge John Sherwood approved WeWork's restructuring plan. WeWork expects to finally exit bankruptcy in mid-June. The plan also staved off a bid by WeWork's controversial founder Adam Neumann, who had sought to buy back the company he founded before he was infamously ousted. WeWork's clean slate will coincide with a new era of working, one in which office workers have pushed back against returning to offices full-time.

As a precocious teen looking to improve my college application, I sat in on a business studies class. I figured taking two extra A-Levels at night school alongside those I took during the day would make me irresistible to admissions tutors. The class I watched examined if it was worth a large factory keeping its own trucks and drivers in-house rather than outsourcing them. The data showed selling the trucks and firing the workers was more expensive in the long run, and yoked the company to the whims of any third-party logistics company in the local area. Not to mention, if you don't own a mission-critical component of your business, you're a lot less powerful when negotiating with your suppliers.

For me everything is evolution," he says. Nor is he a big fan of the "gig economy", the use of often poorly paid contractors, which has been used to power so many other "disruptive" tech platforms like Uber and Lyft. Reef kitchen employees are staff and get paid $20 an hour. "Our approach from the beginning was that this has to be a business built on ownership and accountability," he says. "In general I don't believe in the fundamentals of building a business on gig workers.

Masayoshi Son has sharply accelerated the pace of his startup investments this year, quintupling the number of companies in his Vision Fund 2 portfolio in less than nine months. The founder of SoftBank Group Corp. has cut 115 deals this year, according to Bloomberg calculations based on data released by the company. That is more than the combined number of deals the first Vision Fund made since its start in 2017, showing Son remains confident in his investing capability despite blunders with office-sharing service WeWork and financier Greensill. The faster pace of deal-making is sure to raise questions about whether Son is risking similar missteps, especially as a string of high-profile departures depletes top talent at the Vision Fund. Seven managing partners have left since March of last year, and last week Deep Nishar, the sole senior managing partner and leading authority on AI, said he would depart by the end of the year.

Ahmed started his career at Cornell's Autonomous Systems Laboratory focusing on human-robot interaction and Bayesian data fusion as well as building algorithms for autonomous cars. What initially attracted you to AI and data science? I fell in love with how people make decisions. Starting with psychology, to social engineering, and finally to how we reason about uncertainty. This led me to dive into Bayesian mathematics and the world started making more sense.

SoftBank Group Corp.'s founder Masayoshi Son said he has $80 billion in cash to buy back more shares and continue investing in both private and public companies. "If our shares drop down, I will buy back more shares more aggressively," the chief executive officer said at the New York Times DealBook conference Tuesday. "We have $80 billion in cash at hand." After a record fall in its share price in March, SoftBank unveiled plans to offload ¥4.5 trillion ($43.2 billion) in assets and buy back ¥2.5 trillion of its own stock. The idea of going private through a buyout has been discussed within SoftBank for at least five years, but Son declined to comment on whether he would take his company off the stock market.

In early 2018, the founders of Chinese artificial intelligence startup SenseTime Group Ltd. flew to Tokyo to see billionaire investor Masayoshi Son. As they entered the offices, Chief Executive Officer Xu Li was hoping to persuade the head of SoftBank Group Corp. to invest $200 million in his three-year-old startup. A third of the way into the presentation, Son interrupted to say he wanted to put in $1 billion. A few minutes later, Son suggested $2 billion. Turning to the roomful of SoftBank managers, Son said this was the kind of AI company he'd been looking for. "Why are you only telling me about them now?" he asked, according to one person in the room.

Masayoshi Son stood on stage in Tokyo this month and told skeptical SoftBank Group Corp. investors that making WeWork Cos. Inc. profitable is not only possible, but will be "simple." Driving that confidence is WeWork's Japanese unit, which is already in the black and will be the springboard for a new service that could help the embattled office-sharing company. While WeWork's board was still deciding in late October between SoftBank's $9.5 billion rescue package and an alternative from JPMorgan Chase & Co., Son spent two full days at the unit's head office in Tokyo, pouring over the books, according to people familiar with the matter. Even before the deal was approved on Oct. 22, SoftBank was working with WeWork Japan on a subscription service called Passport that it plans to introduce worldwide, the people said asking not to be identified because the details aren't public. "Why do we think that WeWork is neither a quagmire nor a sinking business?"

UiPath CEO Daniel Dines, seen here with technologist Kai-Fu Lee at a May tech event in Paris, ... [ ] recently approved layoffs to more than 10% of the startup's workforce. Investors looking for fresh signs the party is over for high-valued tech companies got more ammunition on Wednesday as robotic process automation company UiPath confirmed layoffs of several hundred employees just months after raising money at a $7 billion valuation. UiPath, a Bucharest, Romania-founded business now based in New York, said the layoffs affected between 300 and 400 employees, or about 11% of its workforce. The company said its chief financial officer is stepping down at year's end in what it says is an unrelated move. News of the layoffs and departure were first reported by the New York Business Journal.

The summer of 2014 was a heady time in Silicon Valley. Cash was flowing as freely as Soylent as every Stanford graduate with a half-baked idea about a "pinch point" and a semi-plausible pitch book was lining up checks from venture capital firms. Into this mix came Washboard, a startup so utterly absurd that most of the news outlets that wrote about it (and boy did they write about it) took the trouble to clarify that it was, in fact, "real". Washboard was designed to solve a real, if insubstantial, problem: it can be difficult for those who rely on coin-operated laundry machines to acquire enough quarters to run a load. Banks have limited hours, small businesses are not always obliging, and most apartment buildings don't have change machines.