WeCrashed might as well be called WeBoggle. This dramatization of the already rather dramatic real-life rise and fall of real estate company WeWork is Apple TV+’s entry into the growing fad of fact-based drama in which you rub your eyes in disbelief and then futilely twist on your couch trying to figure out how, what, why and how it all happened.
WeCrashed starts in September 2019, the beginning of the end of WeWork, as founder Adam Neumann would like to know. He is played by Jared Leto, who almost manages to channel rather than pass himself off as a charismatic serial entrepreneur with an Israeli accent, though he and Tom Hiddleston also seem to match on the outside, which is confusing on another level. Neumann is about to be removed as CEO of his own company by the board of directors (led by Anthony Edwards, who plays a similar but savvier version of his role as a financier in Inventing Anna, another show about people’s willingness to believe in a reality designed for them). someone with infinite impudence, no paperwork, and hardly more money than that). A unicorn — a tech industry term for a private startup valued at more than $1 billion — is about to be severely curtailed.
We then jump back (a little back and forth, but not too exhausting across eight episodes) to uncover the story of how Neumann and his wife/muse/cheerleader/assistant Rebecca (Anne Hathaway, just about going from Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin and woo-woo (the actress who turned a yoga teacher into a billionaire ice queen) managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of triumph.
Since all my education and understanding of American company structures, equity stakes, takeovers and buyouts is based on multiple viewings of Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley comedy (I’m afraid Succession was too complicated), I can’t tell you exactly how WeWork came to be judged. at $47 billion at its peak, and why it dropped to $10 billion the moment someone looked at the actual documentation. But I think it has something to do with the fact that Neumann was an outstanding salesman and his wife reflected him twice as much as life size. And, of course, everyone was a little blind to the fact that while WeWork’s buildings were filled with glamorous, trendy tech startups, it was a pretty standard real estate company itself. That “disruptive” innovation that seemed sporty was largely borrowed. Neumann’s $60 million private jet probably didn’t help either. Treating the company and its assets as a personal fiefdom, even if you created it, usually ends badly.
What WeCrashed doesn’t do is give us a lot of information about the structures, systems, or mindsets that allow this sort of extraordinary decoupling from reality in a field that is supposedly full of the brightest and best number processors. It’s a wonderful and very enjoyable story about going from rags to riches and to (relative) filth, but it indulges the viewer’s gloating instead of offering something more meaningful, a broader perspective or critique. In fact, Judge’s Silicon Valley offers more in terms of analyzing the role of greed and ambition in distorting decisions, compromising people and principles, and shaping every turn in the path between a vision and its eventual realization.
There is still more to be done or written about the financial value of charisma—WeWork, led by Neumann, had an almost cult quality. What is the premium for attractiveness over business acumen? Should we expect investors, however wealthy, to still be human beings, to be able to resist this, or should we consider the possibility that they are at least a little receptive to such convincing promises?
The business side of things aside, Leto and Hathaway create a reasonably convincing marriage between two narcissists (even if we can’t tell how much it really looks like a true mix of support and toxicity at the same time). However, they never bring their characters to life as individuals. Their relationship crumbles and buckles under the pressure of near-bankruptcy and other vicissitudes of life of their own making, including marriage vows that Rebecca herself wrote, which anyone outside of Paltrow or lesser Californians on both sides would be wise to shut up. but the couple (who now have five children) are still together. So maybe love really conquers all? Or maybe just shared love for yourself? Or maybe only in an alternate reality where we’re all billionaires.