The Scorpion and the Frog

WeWork, the unprofitable office startup that had roughly 4 happy customers at any given time, fell apart years ago after it became painfully obvious how terrible a business it was. The founder, Adam Neumann, took WeWork from a $47 billion valuation to a failed IPO in just a month, and then received $1.7 billion as a reward for running a stupid company incompetently.

WeWork was legendarily unsustainable and was mostly based on renting buildings from one owner and then subleasing them to an inconsistent stream of business customers. As with many dimwitted startup ideas, the problem…