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The problem with making a documentary about a showman is that it’s hard not to be trapped by him. WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $ 47 Billion Unicorn is so focused on turbulent WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann that he ultimately loses the plot.
WeWork, you may remember, was the subject of a huge scandal over the disclosures in the S-1 document required for its IPO. (The company is now trying to go public using a PSPC, which means someone other than the SEC is doing the due diligence.) We work, which premieres April 2 on Hulu, is director Jed Rothstein’s abridged account of events around the struggling company – but many of the bizarre details that made WeWork’s story so compelling are lost.
Some of Neumann’s images are compelling. In the opening minutes of the documentary, we see a haggard Neumann attempting to film a video for his IPO roadshow; very quickly, he lifts one leg, lets out an audible fart, then scolds the crew for laughing too much. But the documentary’s focus on Neumann’s wacky antics obscures its true army of facilitators in some ways, from Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son to its co-founder Miguel McKelvey, who is barely mentioned.
In doing so, the movie makes the same mistake as Reeves Wiedeman’s Losing a billion dollars fact: it obscures how weird things were at WeWork. Adam Neumann would likely have been allowed to continue smoking weed and investing in wave pools forever if the company had made a profit. When WeWork was in full swing, its eccentricities were treated as proof of its genius. (Steve Jobs was eccentric too!) The story isn’t Adam – it’s a dysfunctional business.
To the film’s credit, he gives the value proposition for WeWork. See, 2008 was a immovable crisis – although we remember the housing crisis, commercial real estate also collapsed. WeWork was a high-risk arbitrage game: signing a long-term lease with a distressed property at a low price, designing a nice workspace, and then billing people to work there. WeWork’s vision was to design solutions suitable for millennials: great coffee, welcoming decor, great food.
Unfortunately, the documentary did not stay true to real estate. If Rothstein had done so, there would have been more details on how WeWork leased buildings from Adam Neumann. Ideally, there would also have been a preview of WeWork’s January 2019 rebranding to The We Company. This move cost WeWork $ 5.9 million, which went to We Holdings LLC, controlled by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey. (The deal was subsequently unwound.) Both related party transactions would have required approvals – it would have been good to know how those meetings went and who was there.
Instead, these main red flags are mentioned briefly at the end, as part of the S-1 scandal. Rather than hard-line reporting, we get a lot of images of Adam and generalizations about millennials. WeWork was something for many vulnerable young people to believe. This movie isn’t the first time WeWork has been compared to a cult, and won’t be the last. (The title of the Wall Street newspaper The next book by journalists Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell is The worship of us.)
The cult society was not exactly unusual at the time; this is a characteristic of Anna Wiener Uncanny Valley, as well. Part of WeWork’s woo-woo vibe comes from Rebekah Neumann, who ran WeGrow, the school part of The We Company. Rebekah studied at the Kabbalah Center and invited Adam to attend as well. This spirituality was good for business since the seat of Kabbalah was also where Adam met early investors such as Ashton Kutcher. Without Rebekah’s influence, WeWork probably wouldn’t have been able to play so much on its employees’ need to believe. The closest We work just explained that this is all a shot in which we see a red chain bracelet on Adam’s wrist.
A constant feature of reporting on Adam is how charismatic he is. But this movie doesn’t deliver a charismatic leader either – just a repetitive leader. That’s a limitation of the footage: everything Adam knows is being filmed, and it’s all in the service of a WeWork PR campaign. So those footage wouldn’t include, for example, the night where Neumann talked about firing 7% of the staff – then distributed shots and had Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels play a set that included “It’s Tricky.” To have anecdotes like that, you have to talk to the people who were there. The documentary does it a bit, but the employees are underutilized.
Although we see Joanna Strange, the company’s first whistleblower, her appearance is brief – and the documentary doesn’t mention WeWork sued her and even instigated the FBI to prosecute her. (In fact, while the court system is rife with WeWork lawsuits, we only mention very few lawsuits.) Strange is one of the main sources of Bloombergof Founder podcast, which details what the company cost its employees. His recordings, shown on this podcast, show us what Adam looked like when he didn’t know he was on the record – and contains a lot more commentary from WeWork employees.
I would also have liked to know more about WeLive, which looks like a college dorm for 20 years or so. The ties were apparently strong; if you had friends outside of WeLive, they came once and never came back. Gradually, the people who lived at WeLive formed a closed community. I will have love to learn more about who chose to live there and why. Hell, WeLive is probably his own documentary. It would also have been nice to hear from a WeGrow parent or three.
The worst smell is the movie’s tacky ending. You see, everyone who was interviewed talks about the importance of community while putting on their masks – because, of course, this was filmed during the pandemic.
Here’s the thing: the community is powerful! After all, this is what binds people to cults even when they have doubts. The cult members are not stupid; They are usually educated and conscientious people who want to do good in the world, according to cult expert Janja Lalich. They are just vulnerable – much like the 20-year-old who have never had a job before and don’t know what is normal in the workplace.
Finish We work along with insane platitudes about the importance of community, it’s also selling WeWork employees short. These people, often very young, worked grueling hours and therefore had little time outside of their work. This kept them bonded to their colleagues, the only form of community many of them had – and made it much harder to leave. When the IPO exploded, Adam got a golden parachute as these hardworking employees discovered their stock options were worthless. They deserved better from WeWork. They also deserved better from this documentary.
WeWork was growing so rapidly that its offices were often not completed on the first day they opened; the carcinogenic fumes in the telephone booths were, it turns out, the tip of the poor iceberg. (Founder has the best account of the worldly horrors that WeWork employees have faced: beer keg disasters, buildings that opened without bathrooms, condom wrappers in overwhelming places, and thundering herds of mice.) We work looks like a hasty attempt to put together archival footage and in so doing tells the story of a wild and crazy guy. If I’m McKelvey – or a member of the WeWork board, or anyone else who should have overpowered Adam Neumann – I’d breathe a sigh of relief: I’m off the hook. Much like WeWork itself, Rothstein’s film offers mostly vibrancy, with little substance to back it up.
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