This article is part of the On Tech newsletter. Here . is a collection of last column.
It’s a win that WeWork has made it this far. This week, a smaller version of a start-up that rents office space is set to go public, nearly two years after investors WeWork promotions viewed, company almost ran out of cash, and its founder gone with luck.
WeWork is hardly the only high-flying start-up that falters. federal prosecutors said That blood testing company Theranos claimed it could perform hundreds of medical tests using a single prick of blood, and its founder is now under trial. my colleague Ben Smith raised questions about Has digital media start-up Ozzie increased its audience size?
Young companies like this don’t mean much to the wider world. most of their affluent investors Can afford to lose money. (start-up employees who lost your job and the people who got misleading blood test results performed poorly.)
However, WeWork’s spectacular rise, fall and (probably) recovery come at a heavy cost. like using the stories of the banking recession and rich people from more than a decade ago Least legal means of paying taxesStart-ups, erroneously, contribute to the idea that the American financial system and economy are rigged to favor the wealthy and connected.
To be clear: wealthy and powerful Work Come forward. That doesn’t mean it’s healthy for people to feel fatalistic about how things work.
“If people feel powerless, then all institutions lose faith. This is the tragedy we have now,” said Anat R Adamati, a finance and economics professor at Stanford University who has studied the effects of the banking recession and other corporate crises.
i am both grateful and fearful Here’s what young and sometimes flamboyant, overzealous or absurd start-ups have done in the past decade. they have ambition and cash Re-imagine old ways of doing things in health care, transportation, education, housing, shopping and other areas of life.
More than a decade’s craze for all things we have given miracles that have improved our lives and a cottage industry of financially unstable companies that has at times caused devastating losses and has given us the mess to deal with. left it. this is complex!
What I’m impressed with is the overwhelming smell of inappropriateness. When start-ups have been successful, they have made most of the 1 percent even richer. And when start-ups overflow and explode, the influential people responsible for it face less accountability.
Those who are most optimistic about young tech companies haven’t really considered this unfairness. (One reform they support is easing the rules more People outside the super rich invest in start-ups.)
These companies or people are usually not breaking the law. Of the start-ups I mentioned in this newsletter, only Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is facing criminal charges. (He has pleaded not guilty.)
Yet these examples leave us with a sense of injustice that destroys our faith. We feel it when start-up bosses like WeWork’s Adam Newman fail and are rewarded anyway, and when wealthy New Yorkers buy homes for (relatively) cheap using the law. Intended to help low income families. That stinky feeling mostly seeps through the stories of CEOs of unprofitable start-ups that have become Some of the Highest Paid Executives in Corporate America.
We can understand how ambition can lead people to greed or deceit, especially if no one tells them. Inappropriateness is not the result of individual bad apples, but the result of systems that are bogged down for the rich and powerful, and supervised or ineffective, including government officials.
Dr. Adamati at Stanford told me that when his students learn more about some of the unfairness of the business and financial systems, many of them feel very frustrated. she encourages them resist that feeling.
She tells them to run for office, pressurizes for change inside their future employers, whistles when they do wrong – to fight against the craze that plagues America’s financial and economic system. It’s unfair and that’s it.
Before we leave …
-
Today’s version on the Internet: My colleague Dai Wakabayashi reports that An animal rights group sued YouTube This was attributed to the website’s repeated failures to enforce its policies against animal abuse videos. It’s a well-known complaint: YouTube and other popular websites remove many dangerous or disturbing posts and videos, but many others struggle to stop as well.
-
Google uses more electricity than the state of Maine. Bloomberg News writes about Google’s plans Run the company entirely on clean energy by 2030. (A subscription may be required.)
-
Art museums are on fans only: Vienna’s tourism board has an account on OnlyFans, a site popular with explicit sex actors, NBC News reports. It sounds silly but there’s a serious reason: city museums have been penalized by Facebook, Instagram and TikTok for posting artwork depicting nudity.
hug it
This dog shakes food off the kitchen counter Very nice and wonderful.
We want to hear from you. Tell us what you think of this newsletter and what else you’d like us to explore. you can reach us ontech@nytimes.com.
If you haven’t already received this newsletter in your inbox, please sign up here. you can also read past on tech column.