WeWork and Uber are viable businesses which are heroically trying to absorb flood of excess capital sloshing around the world today. Both WeWork and Uber have potentially enormous TAMs which can justify insane valuations despite being loss-making. And both WeWork and Uber had charasmatic but highly dysfunctional (from a management perspective) leaders who were able to combine salesmanship with dirty dealing to solve the problem facing the big institutional investors - having too much money and nowhere to put it. You can't parcel up $100bn into tiny packets and participate in hundreds of thousands of series A/B/C/Ds - instead you find a business with a plausably enormous TAM, a founder who is essentially a professional PR/brand builder (so as to reassure your clients), pump them full of cash and wait for the IPO.

WeWork didn't quite make it over the line this time, but I wouldn't count them out just yet.

There is nothing stopping WeWork or Uber becoming profitable businesses, even if it means they have to forgo volume (for Uber, they almost certainly have to increase fares. WeWork would have to stop building new locations). The explaination for why they don't is the above.