A few months ago I blogged about the Hulu channel’s documentary, "WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn" in a piece titled, “WeWhoop$” . This blog essentially was review of a terrific 100-minute expose on the now well-known epic story that was a financial face plant on so many levels along with additional commentary about the how’s and why’s and whether have we finally learned our lessons from our desire to continually recreate the 17th century’s Tulip Mania. Chances are we still haven’t, and we’ll go through a few more rounds of this type of fever.
In this weekend's "Wall Street Journal" a fascinating article written by WSJ reporters Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell, "The We That Didn't Work at WeWork", which is excerpted and adapted from their upcoming book, “The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion,” goes into in-depth detail about the financial dealings and the ultimately failed negotiations between WeWork and SoftBank respective CEO's Adam Neumann and Masayoshi Son. The book is due out July 20th and published by Crown.
Along these same lines, a new limited series produced by Apple TV+ due to premier in 2022 titled,“WeCrashed,” starring Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway in the featured roles of Adam and Rebekah Neumann. The series synopsis is as follows, “The greed-filled rise and inevitable fall of WeWork, one of the world’s most valuable startup and the narcissists whose chaotic love made it all possible”, pretty much gives away the plot and subplots away. But as entertaining as this will most likely be, it will also be quite difficult to not throw a shoe or something worse at the screen yelling, “Who didn’t know this was coming?” along with a few other invectives and choice words.
(Anne Hathaway and Jared filming "WeCrashed" in NYC. photo by Celebzz)
There is no need to go into the rationale or lack of rationale that goes into this story because there are many avenues in which to find this as stated above. However, outside of the obvious financial losses carried by those who were involved and the devastation that this caused, there’s a still a good story to be told here and obviously will keep being told, at least until the next one.
Comments