On August 23, the head of U.S. marketing for WeWork emailed several of her colleagues to deliver some bad news. She’d met with Google representatives the day before to go over WeWork’s planned spending on advertising and received a distressing report. Google had examined its all-seeing index of the internet, crunched the data, and found what the marketing executive described as “the most alarming negative sentiment trends they have seen compared to prior companies in similar situations.” In this “very challenging” environment, any attempt at buying ads to divert users away from the rapidly growing mass of articles, podcasts, and Tweets critiquing the company would “blow through our weekly paid search budget in a few hours.”
In other words: People did not like WeWork, its business model, or its leadership, and they were not shy about saying so. The head of marketing offered a note of condolence to the company’s chief spokesperson, acknowledging that, at this point in WeWork’s nine-year, largely upward trajectory, good news was suddenly hard to come by. The problem was that this particular moment was also just weeks before WeWork planned to ask the public to invest in its company in an initial public offering. WeWork had recently filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission describing its business — a flexible office provider with a stated mission to “elevate the world’s consciousness” and $1.6 billion in losses last year — and had almost immediately become a punching bag at which seemingly anyone felt free to throw a jab. (A day before the Google meeting, Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang had declared WeWork’s $47 billion valuation “utterly ridiculous.”) The looming IPO brought the oddities of the company into wider public view for the first time, and, if Google’s results were any indication, the public — investors, journalists, rubberneckers, and presidential candidates alike — did not like what it saw.