The drama behind WeWork's staggering demise is now the plot of an Apple TV miniseries, WeCrashed, out this March. The series stars Jared Leto as Neumann and Anne Hathaway as his wife, Rebekah.
In the trailer, viewers are introduced to WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah, as well as Neumann's dream of "what tomorrow looks like." "You know you're not God, right?" fellow WeWork cofounder Miguel McKelvey asks Neumann at the end of the teaser. "You have to admit, I do look a little bit like him," Leto's Neumann ominously responds.
When it launched back in 2010, WeWork was heralded as the future of our working lives. It was the buzzword for a generation of freelancers, start-up founders, and mobile entrepreneurs who traded in their furious coffee-shop laptop sessions for sleek co-working spaces and networking with free beer on tap.
At its height, it had locations in nearly every continent globally, was valued at $47 billion, and was planning almost literal world domination, with scope to expand into gyms, homes, and even schools. Yet by the end of 2019, it was almost bankrupt, and its charismatic CEO and founder, Adam Neumann, had stepped down.
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month, showrunners Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello described "WeCrashed" as an eight-episode "cautionary tale" that's told, "through the prism" of the world-famous couple at its center.
Eisenberg said,
"We as a society get swept up in unicorns and this idea that you can get rich quick. I mean, Adam Neumann unironically said that he wanted to be a trillionaire. That's just wild."
