Reality may not be too far a departure from fiction. Great writeup by Professor Galloway on how this could have been a CIA job in the form of a Homeland treatment I found really fun to read:
The economic system is driven by greed, there are countless other companies that have essentially been vaporware with no serious amount of foreign investing like WeWork had. Stock symbol GTAT was one that went bankrupt on contract to make sapphire screens for Apple. They weren't a scam but way over promised on what they could do, fooled Apple's due diligence to spend half a billion dollars on a plant in Arizona to make these sapphire screens. Both American companies, GTAT headquartered in New Hampshire and mostly large US institutional investors as their main shareholders.
WATT is another one that I know of and have been following, claims the ability to wireless charge phones not on a mat but in a given area or in a room. However they is no feasible way they can simply overcome physics on that: radio waves follow an inverse square law for power density and they won't get the type of power delivered for that and other reasons. Using a mat if you want wireless charging is about as good as its going to get for the trade offs that come with that. Anything else just doesn't seem economical or able to provide enough of an advantage for people to buy it.. getting that advantage is going to be really hard especially with the technology the company is developing, cause inverse square law. Also wattage for charging a phone is increasing, and we're now seeing power adapters using GaN and delivering 40+Watts in a small form factor... the gap will continue to widen and they won't be able to overcome physics. Yet the stock was as high as 15 or so dollars a share in the last year. Now down to around 2... in this market that is no easy thing to do. Heck even Apple couldn't get it right to make a mat that could charge 3 different devices at once and had to cancel it because, once again, physics.
Enron is the classic example for vaporware and downright fraud. If any entity was hit the strongest by that it would be the state of California having lost billions in economic activity due to the rolling blackouts that company imposed on the state for years to make money.
Researchers at Disney are probably looking at it because they want some walk-in interactive experience (like their VR stuff) where batteries would either be an ongoing maintenance hassle, or because they have dozens/hundreds of individual objects that would be impractical to recharge by hand. Hmm, like a big room filled with hundreds of mouse sized wheeled robots, or a thousand quadcopters...