Adam Neumann’s vision of a communal, creative, snack hub-filled future comes crashing down in a fake-it-till-you-make-it fable
Jed Rothstein’s very entertaining documentary is another horror story from the tulip-feverish world of tech startups: its subject is WeWork, co-founded in 2010 by the (allegedly) charismatic entrepreneur Adam Neumann – part CEO, part cult leader. His business model was basically really simple: renting out cubicle-style office space to creatives and freelancers in buildings in which he’d bought short leases on borrowed money. But these tenants got shared facilities such as groovy hangout areas, table
Football, coffee and snack hubs and the feeling that they were part of a vital experiment in communal creativity, a vision of a new interrelated future.
Neumann waffled on like this endlessly, like Steve Jobs without an
iPhone in his hand. The business took off, and the hype and the business journalism adoration took off, too. There were annual bacchanalian “summer camps” that WeWork laid on for its clients: “like Fyre festival gone right”, as someone puts it here. Neumann got a mind-bending multi-billion-dollar investment from credulous Japanese banker Masayoshi Son, which caused his megalomania to go over the edge, just as the business began to slide. Then in 2019 he made WeWork’s bizarre IPO (initial public offering), whose hippy-dippy prospectus was, in the words of one observer, like “a novel written by someone who’s shrooming”, and the emperor’s nudity was now impossible to ignore.