Goldman Sachs says it lost $80M on WeWork investment

Goldman Sachs said it lost $80 million on its investment in WeWork, helping fuel a 26 percent profit drop at the Wall Street giant.

The collapse of WeWork’s parent company’s initial public offering last month weighed heavily on Goldman, which had a 1.4 percent stake in the office-sharing startup.

Goldman had reportedly floated that Wall Street could ultimately value the We Company, WeWork’s parent, as high as $90 billion — about double its valuation at the last round of private funding — calling into question how much of a loss it was going to report Tuesday.

Analysts at rival bank Morgan Stanley predicted last week that Goldman might have been forced to write down its investment by as much as $264 million, since it had been increasing the value of its stake with market valuations.

The write-down isn’t a total loss for the bank, though. Chief Financial Officer Stephen Scherr said on a call with investors that the bank still had about $70 million in profits in its investment in WeWork.

Also weighing on Goldman’s third-quarter earnings were a $267 million loss in investments in Uber and other publicly traded tech companies.

“Expectations for Goldman Sachs this quarter were already low, but the bank failed to deliver even on these revised forecasts, stumbling in areas where rival JPMorgan Chase just announced far more favorable results,” Octavio Marenzi, CEO of financial consultancy Opimas, said in a statement.

The bleak third-quarter earnings — which included a 15 percent decline in investment banking revenue and a 40 percent drop in investment revenue — led the bank’s stock to fall as much as 3.5 percent before ending the day flat at $206.46.