WeCrashed kicks off a year of TV roasting rabid tech-bubble CEOs

polygon.com:

In WeCrashed, Jared Leto and Anne Hathaway become the latest to enter the world of ripped-from-the-headlines tech stories as they take on the roles of Adam and Rebekah Neumann, whose at-times incoherent vision helped make WeWork a name on everyone lips before everything came crashing down. A new trailer for the show, which premieres on March 18 on Apple TV Plus, captures the mania of the company’s skyrocket moment.

Full disclosure: from 2014 to 2015, I worked at WeWork in a low-level position where I encountered both Adam and Rebekah. In 2021 I briefly communicated over email with a writer and producer of WeCrashed, who wanted to know if I could confirm a story from 2017. I couldn’t, and that was the entirety of the interaction. But from personal experience, I can say that Leto and Hathaway are pretty convincing. Leto’s Israeli accent passes muster and his hair is the right length. (Neumann’s hair was crucial to his mythology, saying that as a long-haired Israeli, he had a resemblance to Jesus.) The early animations show what Neumann’s main power was: to make somebody believe in his vision, if only long enough for them to write a check.

WeCrashed will undoubtedly get into the sketchy economics on which Adam’s vision was based, as well as the debauchery of WeWork’s Summer Camp retreats (“debauchery,” in my personal experience, meant endless mimosas, a horrible Chainsmokers concert, a pretty good Weeknd concert, and more cocaine than I had ever seen). But WeCrashed also gives a finality to the story of Adam and Rebekah. The show was adapted from a podcast, and their story has also been turned into multiple podcasts, documentaries, and books, like The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Billion Dollar Loser by Reeves Wiedeman.