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This Adam Neumann guy is a living legend. The inevitable HBO miniseries will have an A-list actor and associates will tell tales of his exploits for decades. $1

This Adam Neumann guy is a living legend. The inevitable HBO miniseries will have an A-list actor and associates will tell tales of his exploits for decades. $1 billion parachute and public investors never got burned. I feel most bad for the employees, but that’s the free market for you. Bernie Madoff represented the worst of the financial crisis villains, and Adam Neumann is the millennial con artist for the unicorn era. A man of the times. I keep eating up these stories, as I’m sure most of us here are as they keep getting upvoted to the front page. Fascinating

Waterluvian 7y ago
I have two live-action soap operas that I follow closely as my guilty pleasures. The main one is the Trump saga and related stories, anchored by Ken White and Josh Barro's phenomenal podcast, "All The President's Lawyers." The second is the swamp called Silicon Valley: Theranos, Wework, etc. But I don't have a good anchoring podcast for it, I only get it piecemeal via HN and such. So recommendations appreciated!
- jessedhillon 7y ago
  Pivot by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    Going to check that out. Thanks for sharing!
- systemdtrigger 7y ago
  The Trump one is totally badly written and really stands out as fictitious. One side excites it's base by making wild promises but when it seems that they would lose they make up fake collusion dossier and used the full power of their owned govt and bought media apparatus. And then 2 years later when turned out everybody lied and their was no collusion, not a single person batted an eye? Come on, that doesn't happen in reality.
- josefrichter 7y ago
  Maybe Silicon Valley - the HBO TV show? Not "live action" but all this stuff keeps happening over and over again, just with different logos on it..
tygertgr 7y ago
Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were way more interesting, and there was an actual business and plan there that made some amount of sense.
- firasd 7y ago
  I don't think this is a fair comparison. WeWork is guilty of projecting too optimistically. Enron was engaged in massive accounting fraud, booking potential future revenues in this quarter's numbers, etc.
  - supercommand 7y ago
    This sounds like Tesla. No recurring revenue, pushing debt forwards. Mmmmm.
- rchaud 7y ago
  Aren't they only interesting if you're an accountant? Their big scam was to find loopholes in revenue recognition standards.
rapsey 7y ago
> $1 billion parachute and public investors never got burned. An unironical hero. Taking a rich, corrupt, murderous regime for billions and providing thousands of jobs. He is taking a whole lot of flak for doing a whole lot of good in the end.
- josefrichter 7y ago
  That's an interesting point of view. Just not sure that everybody on the losing side was rich and complicit in corrupt murderous regime - could have been tiny investors like you and me who put some savings into mutual funds or something.
  - rapsey 7y ago
    WeWork crashed and burned before IPOing. Private investors got burned (i.e. SoftBank vision fund).
    - eru 7y ago
      Lots of tiny investors got burned: employees who took stock options. (You might say that they knew what they were getting into. Startup stock options are risky. But you can't deny all sympathy to those working stiffs.)
- lucideer 7y ago
  Not sure in what world 2400 layoffs without redundancy counts as “job creation”, with the remainder having little to no job security in a company losing 5k on each new customer. Trying to work out the leaps of logic: I guess you're assuming all WeWork employees were unemployable before starting there, and that all other potential beneficiaries of Softbank investment would invariably have been zero-employee operations...?
  - rapsey 7y ago
    I have no idea where you're getting these assumptions from. Laid off WeWork employees were probably employed someplace before working there and will likely work someplace else after WeWork. All employment is temporary. They still extracted billions. Some got more then others. Most just got a job for X years. Likely well paid. How is that anything other than a benefit?

Waterluvian 7y ago

I have two live-action soap operas that I follow closely as my guilty pleasures. The main one is the Trump saga and related stories, anchored by Ken White and Josh Barro's phenomenal podcast, "All The President's Lawyers." The second is the swamp called Silicon Valley: Theranos, Wework, etc. But I don't have a good anchoring podcast for it, I only get it piecemeal via HN and such. So recommendations appreciated!

jessedhillon 7y ago
Pivot by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway
- Waterluvian 7y ago
  Going to check that out. Thanks for sharing!
systemdtrigger 7y ago
The Trump one is totally badly written and really stands out as fictitious. One side excites it's base by making wild promises but when it seems that they would lose they make up fake collusion dossier and used the full power of their owned govt and bought media apparatus. And then 2 years later when turned out everybody lied and their was no collusion, not a single person batted an eye? Come on, that doesn't happen in reality.
josefrichter 7y ago
Maybe Silicon Valley - the HBO TV show? Not "live action" but all this stuff keeps happening over and over again, just with different logos on it..

tygertgr 7y ago

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were way more interesting, and there was an actual business and plan there that made some amount of sense.

firasd 7y ago
I don't think this is a fair comparison. WeWork is guilty of projecting too optimistically. Enron was engaged in massive accounting fraud, booking potential future revenues in this quarter's numbers, etc.
- supercommand 7y ago
  This sounds like Tesla. No recurring revenue, pushing debt forwards. Mmmmm.
rchaud 7y ago
Aren't they only interesting if you're an accountant? Their big scam was to find loopholes in revenue recognition standards.

rapsey 7y ago

> $1 billion parachute and public investors never got burned. An unironical hero. Taking a rich, corrupt, murderous regime for billions and providing thousands of jobs. He is taking a whole lot of flak for doing a whole lot of good in the end.

josefrichter 7y ago
That's an interesting point of view. Just not sure that everybody on the losing side was rich and complicit in corrupt murderous regime - could have been tiny investors like you and me who put some savings into mutual funds or something.
- rapsey 7y ago
  WeWork crashed and burned before IPOing. Private investors got burned (i.e. SoftBank vision fund).
  - eru 7y ago
    Lots of tiny investors got burned: employees who took stock options. (You might say that they knew what they were getting into. Startup stock options are risky. But you can't deny all sympathy to those working stiffs.)
lucideer 7y ago
Not sure in what world 2400 layoffs without redundancy counts as “job creation”, with the remainder having little to no job security in a company losing 5k on each new customer. Trying to work out the leaps of logic: I guess you're assuming all WeWork employees were unemployable before starting there, and that all other potential beneficiaries of Softbank investment would invariably have been zero-employee operations...?
- rapsey 7y ago
  I have no idea where you're getting these assumptions from. Laid off WeWork employees were probably employed someplace before working there and will likely work someplace else after WeWork. All employment is temporary. They still extracted billions. Some got more then others. Most just got a job for X years. Likely well paid. How is that anything other than a benefit?