WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn

The validity of the documentary is not to validate the subject. This can be a good documentary even though WeWork or Adam are not validated as an idea or a person...

It's a story as old as time. Arrogant chancer spins a yarn and enough people believe it, such that it soon becomes too fast-moving a snowball to stop!

The docu goes to great lengths showing you this 'amazing speaker' with enough 'shit speaker' footage for you to question what the hell they were all thinking. But the answer is right in front of you - average people with no life experience... "tell a 30 year old man he's Jesus and he will likely believe it"...

I found the culmination of the documentary hilarious as the group of snowflakes who had been taken advantage of were left bewildered as their chance to change the world had been taken away from them... This is what happens when everyone gets a medal for participating, folks.

As a middle-aged guy from outside the bubble-cult said "give me a break, they're just renting f***ing desks". It would have served them all well to have put this up in neon above the door - but then, how would they have been able change the world...?

Everyone is talking about this guy as a loser. But he engineered 450m or so from other people's greed and naivety, without breaking laws... Though he's morally horrendous, he's been rewarded for his actions. Think on that before you think justice has been served in the end.


8/10

It's not a bad watch, and fundamentally it's not a bad introduction to the topic but I think it lacks perspective.

There's tons of stuff to cover with WeWork, and a 104 mins runtime will force you to make tough editorial choices.

The doc takes its time to paint a picture of Adam's character. Lots of people were wondering if he was dishonest or just crazy. The doc doesn't fully answer that for you but it definitely gives you some pointers. I think that's good.

The rise of WeWork is described in a way that seems almost passive, like it just happened to them. It fails to convey what they did to get off the ground beyond "Adam is a good salesman", which was admittedly a huge part of it.

After so much time spent on Adam and the rise of the company, the canceled IPO and subsequent events are only a small part of the doc, when they should be the centerpiece.

But ultimately, what made this documentary just okay for me is that it lacked what makes others like The Inventor (Theranos) or The Smartest Guys in the Room (Enron) so great: contextualisation. The sense that it's not just a one-off story of spectacular failure from an individual or a group, that even beyond the ripple effects that aren't mentioned (for employees, investors, banks, entrepreneurs and so many more) this is a lesson for private companies and the market at large.

From my own interest in the topic, I know there were systemic reasons to the rise and fall of WeWork, but the documentary fails to explore that, or even to bring up those questions. Could the next WeWork already be right in front of us? What if Adam isn't that different from other startup/tech CEOs? Would WeWork have chugged along fine if they didn't have to go public?

Paradoxically, a good documentary leaves you with more questions than you had at the beginning. It spikes your curiosity to look into the topic more. But this felt more like entertainment, more Fyre Fest doc than Enron doc.

A takedown of a corporate douche that is fully deserving but at the same time, I think this guy is the norm in these spaces rather than the exception. Not that we shouldn’t hate this guy but I feel like he’s more of a symptom than the problem and that isn’t really explored.