If Adam Neumann had borrowed $100,000 from a bank to pursue his collapsible stiletto heel idea, no one would know who he was today. Well, maybe the bailiff responsible for in would know. Neumann didn’t follow up on the folding heel, instead founding a co-working space company called WeWork, claiming it’s tech and he can turn modern work life into one big party. And then he spent billions that didn’t belong to him. So it is that he is not remorsefully paying off debts, but is the subject of a new Apple series and is played by Jared Leto. The series, which revisits his story with a slightly mean sense of humor that you can afford when you have a real tech company behind you, is called we crashed.
Neumann has achieved dubious fame as CEO, at least in America, but the story has made fewer headlines here: He founded WeWork in 2010 with a little money from his father-in-law and the savings of his business partner, and a few years later the company became Valued at $45 billion. WeWork wanted to go public – you have to have a look at the books. The bubble burst. Investors demanded Neumann’s resignation as CEO, and in a rather spectacular deal, the man who had burned billions of dollars bailed out while others rolled the company back to what it always was: sort of a commercial real estate agency.
By far the best series seen on Apple+ so far
we crashed, coming to Apple + from Thursday, is fascinating if only because this series is exciting, even if you even know all that – it’s by far the best of all Apple series to date. Entertaining, the actors are great. Above all, however, eight episodes are spread out in front of the viewer’s eyes, which is not true with the wonderful world of investors and companies that have nothing to sell but soap bubbles. In a clever way that is easy to follow.
Other founders of startups also failed, although they weren’t as revolutionary as they said they were, and the CEO of Uber was also thrown out of court. But not as cinematic as Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah, two truly flamboyant characters and for every photo shoot request from Vanity Fair to have at any time. They talk about togetherness and fire anyone who resents it. At a time when Wall Street considered him a child prodigy, Neumann shuffled barefoot through Manhattan, his long black mane blowing in the wind. Jared Leto is just right for this balancing act between charm and madness, but in the original he exaggerates Neumann’s accent a bit – Neumann, who grew up in the kibuzz, is Israeli.
Neumann claimed to have a cozy solution for the gig economy after the crash of 2008 – WeWork, he promised, would become the space where all the lonely souls who now had to give themselves a job come together. Concerts, summer -Camp, the lofts with never-ending sources of cappucino and alcohol: a perfect setting for a series. And these characters! The Neumanns think their shenanigans will come true if they believe in them hard enough themselves. Anne Hathaway plays Rebekah Paltrow Neumann as an affected bitch with a touch of megalomania, and yet episode after episode you get a closer look behind this constructed me of yoga and pretension: She failed on Wall Street, had no talent as an actress and cannot bear the shame that her cousin Gwyneth has made a career. Adam has charm, but math isn’t his thing. And somehow she sees the potential in this poor fellow, who was able to talk her into a date even though she didn’t want to – together the two then come up with a convoluted company philosophy that sounds a lot like a sect. And that’s how the company develops – like a cult, the “we” in “WeWork” is just Adam and Rebkah, who whisk together a cocktail of kibbutz wisdom and ramblings that gets a lot of people drunk, from whom you get more rationality would expect. A value chain is nowhere in sight.
The employees have a party life, but are poorly paid
Thank God it’s Monday! That’s the credo – working at WeWork, in the offices rented out by WeWork, shouldn’t feel like work. Spoilers: This didn’t work for Neumann’s employees, nor for his tenants, pardon me members. Neumann’s employees take part in the official partying, but their working days are long, the pay is bad, they are fobbed off with shares that should one day make them rich when they go public. Neumann was no longer there when the company went public. The horn fell off the unicorn, with which Neumann compared himself, and what was left was a white horse.
we crashed is based on an Apple podcast of the same name, which dissects the rise and fall of the company and its main players in six episodes. The film adaptation, directed by Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello, is based on the podcast, but it dreamed up behind-the-scenes looks no one ever had, such as Neumann’s marital squabbles; and she surrounds the two with fictionalized characters – America Ferrara plays a branding specialist who Rebekah befriends and then promptly hires Adam, Anthony Edwards an early big investor. But the key data are correct. Ultimately, Neumann’s departure was gilded, as the podcast once said, he “received an incredible amount of money for losing other people’s money”. However, some things in the series cannot be told as economically in any podcast as a dramatized series can. An example: One of the various projects that have nothing to do with real estate is WeGrow – a private school that Rebekah only started because her daughter couldn’t do anywhere else. When the light goes out there, a father yells: But what will become of my daughter’s scholarship now? And in a fraction of a second you can guess how much damage has really been caused, even beyond the investors.
To be fair, long before that, business journalists had raised the possibility that WeWork might just be an overvalued real estate company. Somehow, however, Adam Neumann still managed to pass off his Mitwohnzentrale as a tech company. You then know at the end of we crashed To some extent, how it happened: the more investors fell for him, the more diligently they tried to keep the legend alive, with uncriticalness and even more money, above all the head of the Japanese company Softbank, which then after WeWork had to be accused of making “dumb money” among the people. The Softbank boss gives Neumann 4.4 billion in the series (that’s also the name of an episode) without taking a look at the WeWork books. And only in a film adaptation can one understand so wonderfully why he then throws a few billion afterwards – in the hope of never having to admit his mistake.
WeCrashed, out March 18 on Apple+.
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