When I worked for WeWork between 2014 and 2015, my job was to document the company’s meteoric success as staff writer for Creator, a newly founded in-house publication. Buzzy, millennial-friendly start-ups funding their own content platforms was trendy at the time, but WeWork didn’t want any regular website. The hype around the office was that Creator was going to be like Wired in the ‘90s—a publication heralded, both then and now, as a high point of modern tech journalism buttressed with utopianism. This seemed like a particularly ambitious bar to clear, but nonetheless I was assigned to interview WeWork’s members and read celebrity memoirs in hopes of gleaning business tips, which would then translate into original content for a website loosely focused around highlighting the details of work.
Creator benefitted from the same lavish spending as the rest of the company, and often this spending seemed unrelated to our broader creative mandate. In our case, we threw a party focused around a play we commissioned called The Sunflower Boys about Vincent van Gogh and pulled together a table read starring the late Luke Perry. Attendees received paint cans, actual sunflowers, and giant novelty ears to remind everyone of the play’s climax when Van Gogh chops his own off. Speeches were given, absinthe was poured. The entire point of this theatrical endeavor, to hypothetically drum up interest in our website, got lost somewhere in the shuffle. While Perry did a fine job portraying Van Gogh’s madness, The Sunflower Boys was one of many things at WeWork which struck me as bizarre and kind of pointless. But I needed this job, so I nodded along and applauded. Besides, this was the future of work.
WeCrashed, the excellent new Apple TV+ show based on a Wondery podcast of the same name, doesn’t touch directly on Creator. But it brought back flashbacks nonetheless, cursed memories of bean bag chairs and empty shot glasses. WeCrashed shows how a company sold millennials a revolution as empty as a spent beer tap. It’s all about founder Adam Neumann (Jared Leto) and his wife Rebekah (Anne Hathaway), whose relationship WeCrashed frames as the meeting of two crucial 2010s ideologies: hustling and wellness. He’s an entrepreneur from Israel trying to sell clothing with knee pads for babies; she’s a yoga instructor living in the shadow of her famous cousin Gwyneth Paltrow. Together, along with the grunt work of a shy architect named Miguel (Kyle Marvin), the millions of VC firm Benchmark Capital, and the billions of SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son (Eui-sung Kim), they promise to elevate the world’s consciousness by… leasing unused office space. It sounds ridiculous until it’s a success, drawing clients like Microsoft and IBM and eventually getting a stunning $47 billion valuation.
WeWork billed itself to employees as a “fun” environment, and the ultimate WeWork party was undoubtedly Summer Camp, an infamous yearly festival/rave/networking event. WeCrashed’s third episode takes viewers through the event with Hathaway’s Rebekah as their guide. It’s not fun for everyone: Adam gets to fire a water gun at adoring fans and employees and hop in the bounce house, while Rebekah is forced to meet with lawyers and ponder over blank screens. We learn about Rebekah and Adam’s difficulties with her father Bob (Peter Jacobson), who in a flashback is pressured by a judge to admit he was a fraud when Rebekah was younger (a reference to Bob Paltrow’s real-life involvement with a faux charity). Rebekah must also navigate outrage over a statement she makes on stage about how “a big part of being a woman is to help men manifest their calling,” which risks her getting canceled by the company’s female employees, as well as crafting a letter of support for her father before his character is sentenced to prison for a more recent crime of tax fraud. During a listening session with the angry female employees on the show, she learns how WeWork was apparently a horrible company to work for, where employees sleep with their bosses in the office “fuck closet” after late-night ragers and barely make any money.
I was not the most enthusiastic partygoer at WeWork, so when I would get feedback from higher ups it was suggested that it would be in my best interest to attend the technically-optional Summer Camp. As expected, Rebekah’s perspective on WeCrashed differs vastly from my own experience in 2015: While most employees stayed in tents in a muddy field, worsened by late night rain, Rebekah, Adam, and the rest of the C-Suite stayed in cabins. In my experience, WeCrashed accurately depicts the amounts of alcohol consumed at WeWork events like Summer Camp, although I saw what looked like more than a few folks enjoying cocaine and hallucinogens. (I spent most of the weekend out of my mind on vials of psilocybin given to me by a co-worker who had gotten them from his shaman.) While the Neumanns’ fascination with celebrities is seen throughout the show, these interactions were not always seamless, like when I watched T.J. Miller get booed off a Summer Camp stage after making a series of poorly received jokes. After his mic was cut off and he stormed off stage, he came back and apologized to the crowd like a sad, punished child.
The debauchery makes for a fun set of sequences, but WeCrashed also focuses on Adam and Rebekah’s amazing ability to edit out distractions and will their own vision of reality into existence. As he pitches investors, the show visualizes Adam’s words magically becoming real. Scene after scene shows Rebekah being told about terrible working conditions—at Summer Camp, she walks over piles of trash littering the ground before stepping on a used condom, and she still remains convinced that her company is elevating the world’s consciousness. When reality doesn’t bend to her will, Hathaway zeroes in on the head of Communications, Vanessa, the first of WeCrashed’s many scapegoats. The question of what Rebekah specifically did at WeWork is a running theme throughout the show, and was something many of us sometimes wondered about as well. Hers is a ridiculous journey which sends a scene-stealing Hathaway through the gamut, fake-acting through Chekhov one minute and channeling her inner muse, and then her inner maverick, and then her inner magician.
Watching WeCrashed, I feel like I’ve gained context for my own bizarre experience with the company. The job felt off at the time, but the reality of needing the work (and the money) kept me from probing too deeply. In retrospect, Creator feels like just another of Rebekah’s several attempts to find deeper meaning in WeCrashed, which peaks in the show as she develops her WeGrow school. In my experience, the show gets many details right: the way bosses would give employees stage directions to laugh and talk at specific moments to impress potential investors; the never-ending chants of “I say We, you say Work”; the gong. But what it gets right most is that however deeply Adam and Rebekah seemed to believe in their bullshit—and in my opinion, they believed it very deeply—it wasn’t the alleged ideological debt to kabbalah, or the manifestation of anything, that made WeWork a success. When Hathaway’s Rebekah asks why the company needs millennials so badly, an executive bluntly tells her it’s because “they work 80 hours a week for free beer and T-shirts.” Real-life former employees have described being given misleading titles and denied overtime, meal breaks, and rest breaks. In 2016, an associate community manager named Tara Zoumer thought she was overworked and underpaid, not to mention owed overtime; when she refused to waive her right to a class-action lawsuit, WeWork fired her. (Zoumer eventually sued the company and settled.) The company has settled a number of other labor disputes with employees, including with its non-Millennial janitorial staff; the terms of those settlements are protected by non-disclosure agreements.
Millennials really wanted to save the world, as the cliche goes, and we really wanted to party. WeWork saw the potential for a business where the two were one and the same. WeCrashed doesn’t delve into the philosophical underpinnings of the would-be “capitalist kibbutz,” but it does make sure to depict Hathaway’s Rebekah’s shock when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warned WeWork investors they were “getting fleeced” in 2019. “I can’t believe I donated to her campaign,” she says, stunned by the audacity of anyone who wouldn’t want to change the world by rising and grinding.
After several personal shuffles and reboots, it was clear that Creator wasn’t actually going to become Wired in the ‘90s. Even amidst breakneck growth—which WeCrashed shows threw fiscal caution out the window—my job was, to quote the late David Graeber, bullshit. But that didn’t stop the tears from flowing when WeWork fired me. I had taken incredible drugs from the true believers who followed Adam and Rebekah’s siren song. They had become paper millionaires along the way, and I had convinced myself I was their peer. I just needed to believe harder, my fake passion needed to become real. As I was escorted by an Honesty Market, the company’s honor system-based snack kiosks, for the last time, I couldn’t have predicted that in a few years many inside the building would be just as screwed as me.
Neither could Adam or Rebekah, who thought the party would never end. But while rank and file workers felt abandoned in the midst of company uncertainty, the Neumanns reportedly left the whole debacle richer to the tune of over $445 million. Just as important as their riches is how their type of messanic optimism has spread beyond WeWork’s many doors, extending to the WAGMI mindset of crypto, which has taken Adam and Rebekah’s rise-and-grind-meets-spirituality energy and super-sized it. WeCrashed shows that for all of Adam and Rebekah’s eccentricities, when push came to shove, when WeWork employees were left without jobs and they walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars, they were always dead serious about their money.