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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

This Adam Neumann guy is a living legend. The inevitable HBO miniseries will have an A-list actor and associates will tell tales of his exploits for decades. $1 billion parachute and public investors never got burned. I feel most bad for the employees, but that’s the free market for you. Bernie Madoff represented the worst of the financial crisis villains, and Adam Neumann is the millennial con artist for the unicorn era. A man of the times.

I keep eating up these stories, as I’m sure most of us here are as they keep getting upvoted to the front page. Fascinating

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Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were way more interesting, and there was an actual business and plan there that made some amount of sense.

I don't think this is a fair comparison. WeWork is guilty of projecting too optimistically. Enron was engaged in massive accounting fraud, booking potential future revenues in this quarter's numbers, etc.

This sounds like Tesla. No recurring revenue, pushing debt forwards. Mmmmm.

Aren't they only interesting if you're an accountant? Their big scam was to find loopholes in revenue recognition standards.

> $1 billion parachute and public investors never got burned.

An unironical hero. Taking a rich, corrupt, murderous regime for billions and providing thousands of jobs. He is taking a whole lot of flak for doing a whole lot of good in the end.

That's an interesting point of view. Just not sure that everybody on the losing side was rich and complicit in corrupt murderous regime - could have been tiny investors like you and me who put some savings into mutual funds or something.

WeWork crashed and burned before IPOing. Private investors got burned (i.e. SoftBank vision fund).

Lots of tiny investors got burned: employees who took stock options.

(You might say that they knew what they were getting into. Startup stock options are risky. But you can't deny all sympathy to those working stiffs.)

Not sure in what world 2400 layoffs without redundancy counts as “job creation”, with the remainder having little to no job security in a company losing 5k on each new customer.

Trying to work out the leaps of logic: I guess you're assuming all WeWork employees were unemployable before starting there, and that all other potential beneficiaries of Softbank investment would invariably have been zero-employee operations...?

I have no idea where you're getting these assumptions from.

Laid off WeWork employees were probably employed someplace before working there and will likely work someplace else after WeWork.

All employment is temporary. They still extracted billions. Some got more then others. Most just got a job for X years. Likely well paid. How is that anything other than a benefit?

I have two live-action soap operas that I follow closely as my guilty pleasures. The main one is the Trump saga and related stories, anchored by Ken White and Josh Barro's phenomenal podcast, "All The President's Lawyers."

The second is the swamp called Silicon Valley: Theranos, Wework, etc. But I don't have a good anchoring podcast for it, I only get it piecemeal via HN and such. So recommendations appreciated!

Pivot by Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway

Going to check that out. Thanks for sharing!

Maybe Silicon Valley - the HBO TV show? Not "live action" but all this stuff keeps happening over and over again, just with different logos on it..

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