Hulu's WeWork Doc Director Jed Rothstein on the Tragedy of the Unicorn's Downfall
Don't go into Hulu's new documentary, WeWork: Or The Making and Breaking of A $47 Billion Unicorn, expecting vindication. Although the film's been propped up alongside the likes of such bombshell docs as Fyre and Bad Blood, the only true connection between the three are an eccentric CEO and monumental crash-and-burn. But part of the joy of watching Fyre and Bad Blood was in witnessing the carnage, relishing in the ludicrous fraudsters unmasked. In WeWork, there's instead a sense of bitter irony. This whole thing maybe could have—perhaps should have—worked.
Jed Rothstein (The China Hustle), WeWork's director, never actually sits down with the face of the company, co-founder Adam Neumann, who made headlines after a disastrous IPO promptly shed billions off the business's valuation. Instead, Rothstein knits together found footage and interviews with former employees to paint a mosaic of Neumann, and more importantly of Neumann's vision—the ideology that shaped WeWork into a unicorn. So much of it was facade, yes—a facade and greed. But unlike his documentary-subject predecessors, Neumann was not a complete fraudster. There was an inkling of a real idea here, and one that his employees were ready to fight for. The problem is that Neumann tossed that idea in with capitalism, gaslighting his co-workers into adoring a toxic culture. And it's with that paradise lost that the documentary feels most tragic, and most poignant.
As the film lands on Hulu, Town & Country sat down with Rothstein to better understand why Neumann became such a worshipful figure, and what there is still to learn from the WeWork mythology.
What first captivated you about this story?
Well, I always had been interested in New York stories. I'm a New Yorker, and I also am always interested in stories about finance and capitalism. Understanding how we treat one another in the context of business and finance can help us understand who we are as people and how our society is set up. It can be quite clarifying.
I knew about WeWork because it was a big company here in New York. But I didn't actually know that much about Adam until he started getting a lot of coverage in the fall of 2019 when they made their failed attempt at an IPO and he presented the company.
Then I learned that Ross Dinerstein and the Campfire guys were planning a film on it, but that they hadn't settled on a director. So I reached out to them and we were of the same mind about the way to tell the story. And we started making it right at the beginning of the pandemic. April 1st, I think was our first opening of our production.
You say you were of the same mind about the vision for this documentary. What was that vision, exactly?
Well, there's clearly a very dramatic spine of a financial mystery, the sort of Icarus-like rise and fall of WeWork—and Adam, in particular. As I learned more about it, I really came to understand that it was the story about the tug between the media and the “we.” Between communitarianism and selfishness, between communalism and capitalism. The larger questions we’re all asking ourselves, especially younger people—the bulk of the people who worked at WeWork were facing it: How do you operate [communally] in this hyper capitalist world?
For example, many people don't work at one place for very long anymore. They've bounced around. They don't have the sort of civic bonds of community that used to be so prevalent in American life. And so these webs of interconnection that are really sustaining to us as human beings, are increasingly absent. And I think that WeWork, the communitarian part of it, really tried to address that. So my vision was to look at, of course you have the plot of how they started and built up and got huge investments from big investors in Wall Street and Silicon Valley, blew up into this huge valuation and then collapsed. But within that, you have the individual stories. This tapestry of the people who went along the ride with Adam, and the meaning of that experience was very real for them—even if some of Adam's pronouncements ended up not being sincere.
I'm curious how you went through the process of lining up interviews with former employees, and how you chose which voices to highlight.
I have a great team of producers who were tireless, casting a very wide net using social media. While we're tracking all these people down and having preliminary conversations with them, it's peak COVID, especially here in New York. So a lot of people weren't even in the city. We're all in kind of panic mode. So in a strange way, people were actually eager to have these conversations, because they were able to tell stories about the “before” time. And there was something very comforting in that.
We spoke to WeWork members; we spoke to executives; we spoke to people on the finance side. We tried to balance people who had the most compelling and regulatory stories with relative representation of the sort of breadth of what we thought represented the overall experience in WeWork. Some of them I found very, very moving, even just speaking to them on the phone. And those were the ones that we decided to try and go through the unusually rigorous process of setting up filming.
Were any of these sources hesitant to sit down with you?
There was a lot of hesitancy. I think people wanted to make sure we were doing what we said, that we weren't betraying their experience in WeWork. I think a lot of them cherish parts of their experience. Even if they are sort of upset at how things ended, they cherish the journey, and independence they made. So they wanted to be sure that we were respectful of that.
Then there were some people, especially the higher up the executive chain we went, the more [concerned] they were by different contractual arrangements they had. Up until very recently, there was all sorts of major litigation up in the air. And even some of the lower-level people were concerned about that.
What about the archival footage? I’m thinking in particular of the truly visceral images from the summer camps—people guzzling alcohol, bodies slammed up against each other whenever Adam took the stage. Then there were the older interviews with Adam. What was the process of finding these videos and stitching them all together?
I realized pretty early on that we weren’t going to get Adam to sit down with us. But I also knew that WeWork recorded everything, that they had an enormous social media presence, both on their official channels, and through crowdsourcing members and workers who just put stuff up on their own accord.
If we could sift through that and find the right material, there was so much we could use as a tapestry, not just of the journey of Adam, but also the journey of these other people who went on it with him. Then, of course, finding unguarded moments with him was the goal. He has hundreds of hours of being “on,” TV Adam. So it's nice to see moments where he's not “on.” I think it can be revealing.
And then in terms of the summer camps and other events, we tried to find the moments that seem most poetically representative, and that most encapsulated the essence of what was going on.
You've mentioned the importance of Adam as the central character that he was, and clearly he was instrumental to both the buildup and the downfall of WeWork. But, as you’ve described, there were so many other players involved. So why focus so keenly on Adam?
There was no character whose essence and essential personal conflict was more reflected in the structure and journey of WeWork. Adam's own upbringing, partly on a kibbutz in Israel, is moving around a lot, which I think encouraged him to develop incredible skills. His interface with spirituality, largely through his wife Rebecca...all of these things were projected onto WeWork and the journey that WeWork took.
And in terms of the financial journey, when the company started growing at a really rapid pace and started taking on enormous investments from some of the biggest investors in the world, that path was really driven more by Adam than any of the other co-founders.
So Adam, for all those reasons, became the center of the film. I think, again, his personal story reflects, and is parallel to the journey of the company as a whole.
Miguel McKelvey, WeWork’s co-founder, is noticeably absent from the documentary. Did you reach out to him, or did you decide ahead of time that you wanted Adam at the forefront?
We reached out to him. He either declined, or just never responded, but we did reach out to him. I certainly would have been happy to sit with him. I feel like his influence is actually there. His input to the company was much more felt through its physical shape—the architectural elements of the WeWork experience were evidence of Miguel's input there. He certainly spoke at their events, but Adam was more in the forefront at the end of the day.
Did you have a perspective about WeWork going into creating this documentary, and has that perspective changed now that you have spent so much time with the story?
[When we started making the film], I felt it was more akin to other financial stories. Elizabeth Holmes or Bernie Madoff or something. But at the end of the day, there wasn't any fraud that we found, or that any of the reporters that we spoke to found, or that anyone was accused of or prosecuted for.
I think, instead, this was a story of financial folly and hubris and greed and broken promises. So morally, that changes what you look at. And when you get into the story more, I realized that the journey so many people went on, trying to create a community, trying to find meaning in their work lives, was a real journey and an important one.
We’re in the middle of a revolution, culturally, in terms of how we think about capitalism and race and history and the organization of power in our society. WeWork, in a way, is a fable from the era that just ended. It's a way that things were organized in the time that just stopped. But it gives us some lessons that I think we can draw from and re-imagine the way that we come together in the context of capitalism, in the context of business, and the context of the society.
The documentary talks about the so-called special sauce that made WeWork into a unicorn, and made many people as passionate about it as they were. Having spent so much time immersed in the company’s history, what would you say that “special sauce” was? Adam himself? Something bigger?
I mean, he was a very, very compelling salesman. And I think that he created an environment where the workspace, and going to work, and being part of a team, even if you were working insane hours for not a lot of money, could be a lot of fun. Many of the people who worked there felt that. And I think that that's sort of one of the dreams of, again, the era that just ended—that the line between work and the rest of your life kind of evaporates. You're just doing something that you really like with people that you like, and you're working hard at it. And then, at some hour the beer tabs turn on and it just becomes a party.
I think that selling, that attitudinal shift to people was very attractive. And I think that, even though some of the elements Adam put in were kind of excessive, or grated on some people, I think there were a lot of people who were attracted to the idea that they could belong to something that had more meaning than just whatever job they were doing.
Now that you're done with this project, do you have an opinion on the company and where it’s headed now?
We certainly reached out to the company post-Adam, and they didn't want to participate either. And I've certainly spoken to people who were there after having left, but I don't have any really great insights into what they're doing, other than what's been publicly published.
My hunch is that they shed the Goop-y stuff, they shed the school, and they shed some of the money-hemorrhaging elements of Adam's regime. At the end of the day, the business wasn't worth $47 million, but it's probably worth something. A lot of these co-working businesses like WeWork will probably be poised quite well in the post-pandemic world because of how work is changing and how commercial office space is being rented. So my hunch is if they can hang on for however much longer the pandemic goes on, they'll be well-positioned.
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