Haaretz cuts to their favorite bit:
- Neumann told colleagues that he was saving the women of Saudi Arabia by working with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to offer women coding classes, according to a source. In another meeting, Neumann said three people were going to save the world: bin Salman, Jared Kushner, and Neumann. Shortly after the news broke in October 2018 that Saudi agents tortured dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and carved his body with a bone saw, likely on order from the crown prince himself, Neumann told George W. Bush’s former national security adviser Stephen Hadley that everything could be worked out if bin Salman had the right mentor. Confused, Hadley asked who that person might be, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Neumann paused for a moment and said: “Me.”
It's worth noting that this sort of corporate culture? It's what the VCs want. You're not subletting office space, you're "selling an energy."
In a nutshell: Con-man starts a company and grows it to fairly epic proportions. People with money willingly let themselves be conned out of their money. Employees hired by con-man stick around or learn their limits out of a desire to "make it".
It's more insidious than that. What you describe is Theranos - Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani started a company based on purest bullshit and conned people all along. Those who knew about it were threatened until eventually they couldn't keep things tamped down. It blew up and now we're all waiting for the Jennifer Lawrence Oscarbait. That, we can point to bad actors and gullible investors shined on by a willingness to believe that blood chemistry could be "distrupted". WeWork is worse - Adam Neumann was a dude throwing ideas at the wall until he discovered that subletting desks to freelancers was lucrative. But you don't go from "subletting desks to freelancers" to "I can solve the Middle East" without a whole bunch of people convincing you beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're a genius. And from what I can tell, they did this not on the assumption that owning WeWork would make them rich, but on the assumption that selling WeWork would make them rich. Theranos was people thinking they were getting in on the next Apple - the ur-company of healthcare, the place where the revolution would begin. WeWork was people thinking they were getting in on the next Uber - an iterative solution to a known problem that is somehow worth insane amounts of money because people keep piling the phantasm higher. If you look at it, the people at the heart of Theranos knew blood chemistry and knew what they were doing was effectively impossible. Holmes and Balwani kept them all siloed so they could reasonably believe that the problems they saw with their own two eyes were being solved by someone behind this, that or the other Chinese wall. The people at the heart of WeWork had no fucking clue what they were doing but if someone wants to reward you for buying pizzas at $13 and selling them at $12, are you going to let them? For how long? When do you say "stop"? When do you question the people throwing money at you? Jamie Dimon is your personal banker. One of the eight guys called in to bail out the economy in 2008 is the guy approving your mansion purchases. Do you say "Jamie I recognize that you run a financial services company with two point seven trillion dollars in assets but I kinda feel like maybe things are a little out of control and I mean, I oughtta know I tried to sell baby clothes with kneepads"? To me, this is the venture capital industry looking for things they can sell to each other for no reason other than hype. And they hyped themselves out of $12b. And Gwynneth Paltrow's cousin gets a $500m parachute.