Why the WeWork fiasco makes for compelling TV

SURFING BETWEEN group-building workout routines. Tequila photographs in meetings and pot on personal jets. Barefoot strolls around Original York. Adam Neumann’s quirks had been acquainted to readers of newspapers’ business pages since 2019, when WeWork, the workspace provider with tech aspirations that he co-founded, reached a non-public valuation of $47bn, only to tumble apart after an abortive initial public offering (IPO). The memoir of WeWork and its flamboyant boss have now reached a important wider audience thanks to “WeCrashed”, a brand new series which is in a situation to circulate on Apple TV+ from March 18th.

Long-established culture, whose creators lean left, revels in skewering the perceived greed of capitalism, also by device of the prism of staunch-lifestyles business figures. The villains commerce with the occasions. In the 1990s it changed into as soon as the engage-out barons (“Barbarians on the Gate”). After the financial disaster of 2007-09 it changed into as soon as the funding bankers (notably on stage with “The Lehman Trilogy”) and other financiers (on the silver cloak with “The Enormous Short”). As astronomical tech grew too astronomical for some tastes, the highlight turned to its misanthropic billionaire bosses (“Steve Jobs”, “The Social Network”).

The most modern cohort of capitalist anti heroes and -heroines to salvage popcultural medication contains the darlings of Silicon Valley’s startup scene. “The Dropout”, a series streaming on Hulu and Disney+, recounts the upward push and tumble of Elizabeth Holmes and her untrue blood-testing firm. Showtime’s “Enormous Pumped” dissects the lifetime of Travis Kalanick, Uber’s shiny but abrasive co-founder. “WeCrashed” belongs to this vogue.

Mr Neumann and his new-agey wife, Rebekah (“danger is a different”), are made for TV. Most chief executives have astronomical egos but few can match the sheer scale of the couple’s narcissism (or beauty). Mr Neumann, who grew up in an Israeli kibbutz, as soon as claimed that the elusive Heart East peace treaty would possibly well be signed at a WeWork venue. His company’s IPO prospectus promised now not merely to provide helpful co-working design but, it appears to be like with out irony, to “elevate the field’s consciousness”. Portrayed masterfully by Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway, the on-cloak Neumanns are, bask in many startup founders only extra so, both intoxicating and painful to search. It is with out note easy to treasure why so many investors felt at as soon as besotted and miserable around them.

Mr Neumann’s knack for distorting truth—most notably by dressing up a lossmaking office-rental firm as a winning tech massive—is a trait standard to many winning founders. It is now not the whole memoir, alternatively. “WeCrashed” also depicts how the truth of Silicon Valley distorted him and his firm. In a single scene Son Masayoshi, the messianic boss of SoftBank, a free-spending Jap tech-funding community that poured billions into WeWork, tells Mr Neumann, “You’re now not loopy ample.” A string of different prominent venture capitalists likewise impressed the corporate to are trying for the celebrities. So it did.

Fascinating characters apart, WeWork’s upward push and tumble makes for compelling TV resulting from it follows the dramatic arc of a Greek tragedy: a protagonist grossly overestimates his talents; his hubris is punished; pronounce is restored. As a substitute of on this case, the punishment is meted out now not by hasty gods but by Mr Neumann’s increasingly impatient VC backers and the general public markets, whose scrutiny of his firm’s heed-torching business model undid the IPO. As such, “WeCrashed” also traces the arc of capitalism’s capability for self-correction. ■

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This article regarded within the Industrial section of the print model beneath the headline “WeBinged”