Work coverage most people have consumed: the company's collapse wasn't just a business failure — it was a systemic failure of venture capital logic itself. The piece's most distinctive claim is that WeWork raised $22 billion without ever turning a profit, and "stands out as the worst Venture Capital deal in history." That's a bold thesis, and Boyle builds it through an unusually detailed telling of how Adam Neumann convinced investors to fund a business model that real estate veterans couldn't understand.
The Slogan King
Boyle opens with what makes this story impossible to ignore: Neumann's early promise was to "Elevate the world's Consciousness" and unleash every person's superpower. But the most revealing detail is how he pitched WeWork — As Patrick Boyle puts it, the company "was founded by Adam Newman a man who spoke mostly in slogans" and "pitched it as a tech company and claimed that we work was the world's first physical social network." The phrase "physical social network" doesn't actually mean anything, but venture capital people love lines like this. This is the core of Boyle's critique: Neumann sold a story rather than numbers, and those numbers were terrible.
The article traces how this played out in practice. WeWork's actual business was straightforward — they rent large office spaces from commercial landlords, divide them into smaller offices, and rent them flexibly to startups. As Boyle writes, "a more accurate description of wework is that it's a shared office space with free beer." But it was hard to raise $22 billion with that description. That's why Newman pitched it as something magical: a tech company disguised as real estate.
The Lesson in Valuation
The most revealing section involves Neumann's first outside investor, Joel Shriber. When asked what the company was worth, Neumann "decided to just throw out a big number and said $45 million" — and Shriber agreed. Boyle writes that Newman learned a very big lesson that day: if you can boldly claim your company is really valuable, you just need one person with money to agree to invest at that price, and the valuation takes on real meaning.
This becomes the through-line of WeWork's history. Benchmark invested $16.5 million at a $100 million valuation — despite knowing that co-working rentals was a business that many Real Estate Investors avoided because it was both risky and a low margin business. When it went well, you didn't make very much money, and as soon as a recession occurred, you lost all your tenants which could lead to bankruptcy.
Adam's focus on growth at the expense of profitability fit very well with a Silicon Valley mentality that it was best to acquire customers by any means necessary and then figure out profitability later.
The problem, as Boyle frames it, is that real estate is a very different business to software where there's next to no cost associated with getting an additional customer. On top of that, the office real estate business has no moat to protect you against competitors — if you're successful, others can easily replicate your business model.
The Tech Pivot That Wasn't
The most entertaining section details how WeWork tried to justify its tech stock valuation despite barely understanding how computers work. Neumann's head of IT was a 16-year-old high school kid nicknamed Joey Cables who installed routers for minimum wage and couldn't be contacted during school hours. The company built an in-house version of LinkedIn that almost no customers used because LinkedIn already existed. They built software to track conference room usage through sensors, experimented with face recognition cameras in meeting rooms that could track facial expressions and tones of voice — all while struggling to process rent payments from their customers.
Boyle notes that "the tech that possibly mattered the most wasn't always working." This is the piece's sharpest observation: WeWork spent years building technological distractions while ignoring the fundamental economics of their actual business.
The Counterarguments
Critics might note that Boyle's characterization of venture capital people as "possibly even more gullible than Michael Lewis" undermines the seriousness of the argument — it reads more like a punchline than analysis. A counterargument worth considering: the piece doesn't adequately address what the lenders themselves knew about WeWork's financials before this default, or whether they knowingly participated in a risky game knowing the company was likely to fail. The narrative frames VC investors as gullible, but the bondholders who lent $95 million in credit might have been making calculated risks.
Additionally, framing this entirely as a "tech vs. real estate" failure overlooks that WeWork's core business — flexible office rentals — actually served a genuine market need during certain economic periods. The collapse wasn't just about model failure; it was about over-extending a legitimate concept into something unsupportable.
Bottom Line
Boyle's strongest move is connecting Neumann's baby-clothes venture (called Crawlers, with built-in knee pads) to WeWork — showing that the pattern of selling promises without products was consistent throughout his career. The biggest vulnerability is that the piece sometimes leans toward mockery rather than analysis, particularly in describing Neumann's "office apartment Maybach and private jet stocked with dozens of bottles of tequila" celebrations. But the core argument holds: $22 billion raised on a story that never translated to profit, and now the bill has arrived. What remains interesting is whether SoftBank or the bondholders will recover anything — or whether this truly is the worst venture capital deal in history.