Last weekend, some 8,000 WeWork employees decamped to Eridge Park in the English countryside for the workspace-sharing company’s seventh annual “summer camp” gathering, a sort of corporate retreat-meets-Coachella for the Silicon Valley set. The lavish bacchanalia was, in many ways, the perfect metaphor for a start-up whose C.E.O. and co-founder, Adam Neumann, describes it as more of a “community” and a “state of consciousness” than a stodgy real-estate company. With WeWork’s new vegetarian policy firmly in place, staffers and their guests listened to speakers like Deepak Chopra, raved over headliners like singer Lorde and indie band Bastille, indulged in lakeside meditation and sound baths, and sipped canned water or refilled their own bottles. (In accordance with WeWork’s sustainability initiatives, bottled water, plastic straws, and meat were strictly prohibited.)

The scale of the festivities was commensurate with the company’s outsize valuation, if not the size of the company. In 2015, when WeWork was valued at $5 billion, its camp included 250 staffers and 1,500 members; last year, the company hosted 2,000 employees and 3,000 guests. This year, WeWork was valued at $35 billion. Some potential investors, including SoftBank Group, think Neumann’s vision could be worth as much as $35 billion to $40 billion—close to double the valuation WeWork obtained last year.

In none of these years, of course, did WeWork turn a profit. Neumann and his co-founder, Miguel McKelvey, have poured much of the $6.9 billion they have raised since WeWork’s 2010 founding into aggressively expanding the company. According to financial documents revealed as part of a $500 million debt offering earlier this year, WeWork lost nearly $1 billion in 2017 on revenues of $822 million—more than double its revenues from the previous year, but still far short of a profit. Skeptics note that WeWork would never be valued as high as it is if Neumann weren’t pitching the company as a consumer-services business. Absent that Silicon Valley gloss, the Financial Times recently argued, WeWork would be worth closer to $3 billion.

Supporters counter that WeWork—which has more than 14 million square feet of office space and will owe $18 billion in rent—will soon begin generating more money than it is losing, and the company will become a powerhouse at the vanguard of a titanic shift in how businesses and individuals think about work. “The potential size of the market [is] the largest asset class in the world,” Neumann told the Hive in 2016. “If I asked you for the name of one brand that was disrupting this space, I bet you wouldn’t have one.” Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya made a similar point to me when I interviewed him that same year. “We need to divorce ourselves from venture capital as an occupation and focus on using capital as a way to take really big bets on things that just seem totally audacious,” he said. “Right now we haven’t done enough of that, and the result is that most of the things we’ve funded are mostly crap and largely worthless.”

WeWork could be one of those generation-defining companies. Investors including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Benchmark, SoftBank, and Hony Capital have already taken that bet, handing Neumann billions to spend on yoga instruction in the English countryside, among other things. Time will tell whether WeWork’s outlays on its latest corporate retreat one day look like a rounding error, or come to look like the height of pre-crash decadence.