Article 6XV2Y America’s infatuation with boy geniuses and ‘Great Men’ is ruining us

America’s infatuation with boy geniuses and ‘Great Men’ is ruining us

by
Alice Bolin
from Technology | The Guardian on (#6XV2Y)

We're obsessed with narratives about powerful men and how they got that way. But our mania for founder myths obscures an ideology of inequality

One Saturday in the spring of 2021, a little achy after receiving our first doses of the Covid-19 vaccine, my husband and I decided to stay in bed and click on the first thing suggested to us by our TV. It was WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, a documentary produced by Hulu about the New York startup WeWork's spectacular fall from grace. The film mostly chronicles the misdeeds of founder Adam Neumann, the surfer-dude dolt who turned a good idea - co-working spaces that lease small offices to tech startups - into a surreally overvalued conglomerate, before he made a mortifying attempt to take the company public that eventually ended in his forced resignation. As a consolation prize, Neumann infamously received a $1.7bn golden parachute.

The WeWork cautionary tale is partly about slick marketing, which is what seems to have convinced its investors that it was a tech startup. Neumann tried to position WeWork as something much more than a real estate company: he borrowed the tech industry's idealistic language about changing the world but upped the ante, insisting that the company's sole mission was elevat[ing] the world's consciousness".

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