Mismanagement
The excerpt below is from this morning's WSJ. I worked on their new corporate office in Manhattan about a year and a half ago. Cost seemed not to be a concern, lavishness was. Peloton is not unique in that but they excelled in unconstrained optimism regarding their own future. Their misreading of the impact of COVID might be the most extreme case of "long COVID" anyone could find. 
In a northwest Ohio industrial park, up the highway from a new Amazon.com Inc. warehouse and a soon-to-open solar-panel plant, Peloton Interactive Inc. PTON -1.49%▼ is building a million-square-foot factory that it will never use.
The once-hot stationary bike maker is selling the facility, initially set to cost $400 million and to be completed this fall, as it races to downsize a manufacturing operation expanded by leaders who believed Covid-driven demand would outlive the pandemic.
Its miscalculation about demand and the shift in the market have been so costly that Peloton—a company worth nearly $50 billion about a year ago—has laid off thousands of people, had to borrow $750 million to head off a cash crunch and is exploring a sale of a minority stake. It is a reminder that strategic choices—not just pandemic forces—determine how businesses emerge from the crisis. Peloton’s value fell to less than $5 billion this past week.
In late 2020—with homebound consumers clamoring for its bikes—Peloton’s co-founder and longtime chief executive, John Foley, dismissed the idea that the company was growing too much based on a demand spike that could prove temporary.
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill
"Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner
“You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis
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