WeWork’s ignominious bankruptcy adds to the growing list of once buzzy SPAC companies that have gone bust

WeWork is the highest profile SPAC blowup. The company’s $9 billion valuation in an October 2021 deal — one of the biggest mergers by enterprise value at the time —  exemplified the profligacy of a near-zero interest rate environment.

“There was a major change in 2021, where quite a few venture capital-backed firms merged with a SPAC and the track record has not been good,” says Jay Ritter, Cordell Eminent Scholar. “Critics of SPACs for many years have said a lot of the companies that were merging with SPACs were low-quality companies and the evidence seems to be somewhat consistent with that.”

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