WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on November 6, 2023. The company that had been valued at $47 billion in early 2019 emerged from bankruptcy on June 11, 2024 as a privately held entity, with pre-bankruptcy equity holders completely wiped out. The decline from $47 billion to zero over four years — driven by a failed IPO, a global pandemic, and a business model that was always more financially fragile than its valuation implied — is one of the most documented corporate collapses in recent history. The S-1 filing in 2019 introduced "Community Adjusted EBITDA," a metric that excluded marketing costs, construction costs, and lease expenses from its EBITDA calculation. The attempt to present WeWork as a high-margin technology platform rather than a capital-intensive real estate operator failed immediately — investors and analysts who actually read the document found a company burning cash at a rate incompatible with the technology multiples being sought. The business model's fundamental structure: sign decade-long leases on office space, divide that space into smaller units, sublease on monthly terms at a premium per square foot. The premium was real. The risk transfer was not — WeWork retained the obligation to pay rent regardless of whether its members continued paying. The pandemic of 2020 converted that structure from a growth story into an insolvency scenario. The bankruptcy allowed WeWork to use Section 365 of the bankruptcy code to reject approximately $19 billion in future lease obligations — effectively right-sizing a portfolio that had been assembled at a scale the business couldn't support. Post-bankruptcy WeWork operates with 4,500 employees, $3.2 billion in annual revenue (fiscal 2022 figure), and a market capitalization of $250 million.