Charles Duhigg, writing for The New Yorker, with as damning a portrait of contemporary VC culture as I’ve seen. The entire piece is masterly crafted, using the failure of WeWork as a lens on the rot at the heart of tech and finance today. A few choice quotes:

V.C.s seem like these quiet, boring guys who are good at math, encourage you to dream big, and have private planes. You know who else is quiet, good at math, and has private planes? Drug cartels.

Turns out the VCs aren’t even good at math.

On being “founder friendly”:

Particularly in Silicon Valley, founders often want venture capitalists who promise not to interfere or to ask too many questions. V.C.s have started boasting that they are “founder-friendly” and uninterested in, say, spending an afternoon a week at a company’s offices or second-guessing a young C.E.O. Josh Lerner, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me, “Proclaiming founder loyalty is kind of expected now.” One of the bigger V.C. firms, the Founders Fund, which has more than six billion dollars under management, declares on its Web site that it “has never removed a single founder” and that, when it finds entrepreneurs with “audacious vision,” “a near-messianic attitude,” and “wild-eyed passion,” it essentially seeks to give them veto-proof authority over the board of directors, so that an entrepreneur need never worry about being reined in, let alone fired.

Whereas venture capitalists like Tom Perkins once prided themselves on installing good governance and closely monitoring companies, V.C.s today are more likely to encourage entrepreneurs’ undisciplined eccentricities. Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank venture capitalist who promised WeWork $4.4 billion after less than twenty minutes, embodies this approach. In 2016, he began raising a hundred-billion-dollar Vision Fund, the largest pool of money ever devoted to venture-capital investment. “Masa decided to deliberately inject cocaine into the bloodstream of these young companies,” a former SoftBank senior executive said.

What one exec called “willful ignorance” is probably better classified as criminal neglect:

Many WeWork executives suspected that the S-1 might cause problems when it became public, but they didn’t say anything, because “there was this massive pot of gold just over the horizon,” one former executive told me. “Basically, we chose willful ignorance and greed over admitting this was obviously batshit crazy.

“And you know what? If it had worked, and we had gotten rich, then everyone in tech and Wall Street would be saying that Adam was a genius right now, and that WeWork is an example of how American capitalism is supposed to work.”