What a fluff documentary for a fluff company the laboriously-titled "WeWork: or The Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn" is. All the financial summarization here--the stupid business plan of pretending boring interior decorating for businesses a transformational tech company, and, of course, the inevitable fraud that funnels the money up top--is less telling than The Economist articles I barely recall skimming through during WeWork's IPO fiasco. I was less informed coming in to the doc about the New Age cultish atmosphere at the company, but it figures.

The most egregious aspect of this documentary is that it spends a lot of time--too much on too little, really--mocking this corporate or start-up culture and its messianic tech-ish CEO figure and the subsequent disillusionment of his employees, but then ends with the same sort of BS montage of irrelevant imagery seen in WeWork propaganda videos while one of those former employees pontificates the same nonsense about "community" that Adam Neumann had been lying about for years. Is that supposed to be ironic, or did "we" learn nothing? This bit of obliviousness is, then, followed by a montage of interviewees putting on and removing masks and some trite comments about the pandemic isolating us. Thanks for continuing to state the obvious, I guess.

I suppose one could do worse for an overview of the mismanaged and stupidly-conceived WeWork, and at least we get to see what tools talk-show hosts, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ashton Kutcher can be, but the documentary doesn't question, let alone challenge, any of the flaws of this particular brand of corporate capitalism, or their cultures, or the obsession at large with start-ups and any CEO with a glow of supposed tech wizardry about him. I suppose I probably should've figured from its full title, though, that this would be nothing more than a topical piece of trendy journalism--something with more time and maybe the slightest of more insight than a Wall Street Journal or Forbes Magazine article--and, indeed, their go-to interviewee on business matter works for Forbes. The result, however, despite the interviews also including former employees, is that its assumed audience is the type of rich investors who chase such "unicorns." If ever a subject was in need of more of an eat-the-rich mentality, this is it. For most people, unicorns aren't real.

I followed the WeWork story for a few years and was a skeptic of the company even before they filed their S1. I was excited when I saw that they were making a documentary about this and watched it recently but came out disappointed overall.

The documentary is more like them pulling out notes from several different articles written about WeWork with added footage they obtained and interviews with about 4-5 employees and several journalists and experts.

There is nothing in this documentary that was not public knowledge except for few tidbits from the employee interviews.

Overall the makers spent about 95% of the time talking about Adam Neumann and his cult like personality and how he misled the people he worked with. While this might have led to their eventual downfall, the downfall itself was the least interesting part about this documentary where they spent about 4-5 minutes on what happened.

Additionally, Adam's wife Rebekah Neumann was given some mentions but they failed to bring in how much she was responsible for the toxic environment that WeWork was. I have read several articles which had interviews with former and existing employees who talked about how Rebekah was there and probably one of the big reasons for the eventual downfall, however, you won't find much details in this documentary.

Overall, this is not a bad documentary and shows what WeWork was and how they enticed (or maybe fooled) young people into giving up things (including taking lesser salaries) to work at WeWork with the hopes that they were building a better world and how they were fooled. However, if you are watching this to know more about the failures and insider views you are better off reading articles around this.

Overall I thought this was well done. It's shocking how a company can grow to a giant but is made of fluff. I enjoyed everything except the end. It seemed like they had no idea how to end it and decided to do something with masks? Just strange.