THE BOY WHO CRIED WORK
Gabriel Sherman — Read time: 26 minutes
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THE BOY WHO CRIED WORK
Adam and Rebekah Neumann grew WeWork to a $47 billion valuation by convincing mentors like Masayoshi Son and Jamie Dimon, along with much of Wall Street, that he had a near-mystical understanding of the working style of millennials. Then, on the eve of its IPO, people realized it was just a real estate company. Inside the crash of a unicorn
Holiday 2019/2020 Gabriel Sherman
On the afternoon of September 18, 2019, WeWork cofounder Adam Neumann was working out of his 6,000-square-foot Gilded Age triplex off Gramercy Park when he got a text alert on his iPhone. The Wall Street Journal had just published an explosive article chronicling what it said was his reckless management of the co working start-up, the era's preeminent unicorn. Neumann is dyslexic, and reading is a challenge, so advisers quickly briefed him on the story's most troubling details: vivid accounts of his heavy drinking, marijuana use, and habit of making grandiose pronouncements like wanting to be elected president of the world, live forever, and become humanity's first trillionaire.
The article could not have arrived at a more perilous moment. Two days earlier, the We Company, We Work's parent, announced that it was delaying its IPO after investors universally rejected the offering, even when WeWork slashed the valuation by 75 percent, to between $10 and $12 billion. In the run-up, a string of high-profile executives had walked out the door, including the chief communications officer, the co-head of the firm's real estate fund, and the global head of real estate partnerships. Just weeks earlier, WeWork had been privately valued at $47 billion—which was $10 billion more than the market capitalization of Ford and double the GDP of Iceland. Now, unless WeWork secured a new source of emergency funding, it would run out of cash before Thanksgiving.
For an embattled CEO running a company on life support, being the subject of a takedown by the business paper of record would mean instant career death. But Neumann, characteristically, assured colleagues that the article was not much more than a speed bump. He controlled 65 percent of the stock and had the power to fire the board of directors if the board moved against him. (So confident was Neumann of his job security that he once declared during a company meeting that his descendants would be running We Work in 300 years.)
We Work executives had long grown accustomed to Neumann's belief that the laws of economics—even reality itself— didn't apply to him. It was in the nature of unicorns that they bent reality, and that certainly had been true of We Work. Fueled by $12 billion of venture capital and debt, Neumann grew WeWork in less than a decade from a single coworking outpost in SoHo into a 12,500-employee company with 500,000 users in 111 cities across 29 countries. But in 2018, We Work had lost $2 billion and had a highly questionable business model—the company signed long-term leases and sublet space to freelancers and corporations on a short-term basis. Its valuation somehow kept rising.
The company's valuation put Neumann's net worth at $4.1 billion—and his spending more than kept pace, "It was Succession craziness," a colleague said. Neumann was chaufeured around in a $100,000-plus Maybach sedan and traveled the world on a $60 million Gulfstream G650. As reported in the Wall Street Journal, he and his wife, Rebekah Paltrow Neumann—Gwyneth's first cousin—spent $90 million on a collection of six homes that included the Gramercy condo, a 60-acre estate in Westchester County, a pair of Hamptons houses and a $21 million mansion in the Bay Area that features a room shaped like a guitar. They employed a squadron of nannies for their five children, two personal assistants, and a chef. "Adam went through money like water," a former executive said.
In a way, the spending made sense, because Neumann himself was the product. He pitched himself to investors as a gatekeeper to the rising generation. A new way of working. A new way of living. Work was 24/7, coworkers were friends, office was home, work was life. For baby boomers who experienced office life as cubicles and bad coffee, his message was irresistible. "Every investor who walked through was sold," a WeWork executive told me. They saw Neumann as a millennial prophet who did shots of Don Julio during meetings while preaching about the dawn of a new corporate culture, one in which the beer and kombucha flowed and MacBook-toting employees would love coming to work. After sitting with Neumann in his office, outfitted with a Peloton bike, infrared sauna, and cold water plunge, Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson told Fast Company that Neumann reminded him of the Apple cofounder. Neumann later told colleagues that Isaacson might write his biography. (Isaacson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Through a combination of egomaniacal glamour and millennial mysticism, the Neumanns sold WeWork not merely as a real estate play. It wasn't even a tech company (though he said it should be valued as such). It was a movement, complete with its own catechisms ("What is your superpower?" was one). Adam said We Work existed to "elevate the world's consciousness." The company would allow people to "make a life and not just a living." It was even capable of solving the world's thorniest problems. Last summer, some WeWork executives were shocked to discover Neumann was working on Jared Kushner's Mideast peace effort. According to two sources, Neumann assigned WeWork's director of development, Roni Bahar, to hire an advertising firm to produce a slick video for Kushner that would showcase what an economically transformed West Bank and Gaza would look like. (Bahar told me he only advised on the video and no WeWork resources were used.) Kushner showed a version of the video during his speech at the White House's peace conference in Bahrain last summer.
To a passel of geezer capitalists, this was too big to miss, even if they didn't fully understand it—possibly, not understanding it was the point. Rupert Murdoch, Sir Martin Sorrell, and Larry Silverstein all took meetings. Mort Zuckerman, the billionaire cofounder of developer Boston Properties, told a real estate executive shortly after We Work launched that Neumann was creating the future of work. Zuckerman soon offered to buy WeWork for $500 million. (Neumann declined the deal but accepted a $2 million investment from Zuckerman.) "Adam was probably the best salesman of all time," a former WeWork executive told me.
In April 2012, Neumann secured his first venture capital funding from Benchmark Capital, the San Francisco-based firm famous for its bets on eBay, Twitter, and Uber. Benchmark cofounder Bruce Dunlevie joined WeWork's board after touring a WeWork with Neumann. "Bruce walked in and he said, 'You're not selling coworking, you're selling an energy I've never felt,' " recalled a former WeWork executive who attended the meeting.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon was also an evangelist. In 2018, JPMorgan led a $700 million bond offering for WeWork. The bank extended Neumann nearly $100 million in loans and was among a group of banks that provided Neumann with a $500 million personal credit line. Neumann told an executive that Dimon was his "personal banker" and might leave JPMorgan to run Neumann's family investment office one day. (A source close to Dimon said that Dimon had no plans to leave JPMorgan.)
Neumann's most fervent believer, though, was Masayoshi "Masa" Son, the 62-year-old CEO of Japan's SoftBank Group. In recent years, Masa had transformed SoftBank from a telecom conglomerate into the world's most aggressive start-up investor, doing more than anyone to inflate the unicorn bubble. Backed by $60 billion from Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, SoftBank pumped billions into fast-growing but money-losing companies like Uber, DoorDash, and Slack. Masa would invest $10 billion in WeWork. "Adam later said, 'I'm crazy but Masa is crazier,' " a former WeWork executive recalled.
Reality came crashing down last August when WeWork filed its S-1 prospectus to go public. Investors were shocked by WeWork's spiraling losses and that the company had spent millions on Neumann vanity projects such as a wave-pool company and a start-up that sold turmeric coffee creamer. Most damaging, however, were disclosures that Neumann made $6 million by selling the "We" trademark back to the company and held ownership stakes in buildings WeWork leased from, essentially paying himself. (After criticism, Neumann returned the trademark money.) He gave his wife a large role in choosing his successor.
"Bruce said, 'You're selling an energy that I've never felt.' "
Suddenly, the pasha lifestyle that made Neumann an avatar of the new economy seemed like something else— millennial entitlement gone insane. (A collapsing unicorn bends reality the other way.) "When he was on the rise everyone painted the most beautiful picture. On the way down they only wanted to show the most ugly picture," Sam Ben-Avraham, a Neumann friend and early WeWork investor, told me. Neumann began hearing from We Work's bankers that Wall Street viewed him as "toxic," a person who spoke with Neumann told me. Looking for advice, he called Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi and texted Travis Kalanick, who had been forced from Uber in 2017 amid a flurry of allegations of discrimination and sexual harassment.
Neumann retained lawyers from the white-shoe firm Paul, Weiss and P.R. advisers from Edelman to set up a war room. On Friday, September 20, Neumann arrived at WeWork's headquarters vowing to fight for his job. "I'm never not going to be CEO," he told a colleague. One of Neumann's favorite words is optionality, but he was rapidly running out of them. In the wake of the Journal expose, investor Michael Eisenberg and WeWork CFO Artie Minson held a conference call with WeWork's directors and argued that Neumann had to step down, two people briefed on the call said. On Sunday afternoon, he met with Dimon at JPMorgan's headquarters. Dimon made it clear that WeWork would never be able to secure fresh capital as long as Neumann remained CEO. And while Dimon didn't say it, the subtext was clear: WeWork was barreling toward bankruptcy, and Neumann would be unable to repay the $380 million he borrowed against the value of his now potentially worthless stock. Two days later, Neumann resigned.
Neumann's fall is one of the most spectacular flameouts in recent corporate history, an Icarus story for its time. Though in Neumann's case, he floated down under a golden parachute. When SoftBank bailed out WeWork on October 22 for $9.5 billion, Neumann walked away with a package that included $1 billion in stock, $500 million in credit to pay back loans, and a $185 million consulting fee. The money, though, didn't blunt the confusion and anger he was experiencing, people who spoke with Neumann said.
In the weeks after losing control of his company, he became paranoid that he was being followed. He heard a rumor from a reporter that one of his investors hired the Israeli private intelligence firm Black Cube—the same firm Harvey Weinstein used to track Ronan Farrow—to dig up dirt on him to force him out as CEO. Mainly, he holed up in his Gramercy condo, trying to piece together what had gone so disastrously wrong.
Not long after Neumann started WeWork in 2010, the then-31-year-old Israeli entrepreneur showed up at a real estate industry conference on Park Avenue wearing his now-familiar uniform, T-shirt and jeans, with shoulder-length surfer hair that looked like it hadn't been washed in days. Neumann, who is six-foot-five and shares model good looks with his sister, a former Miss Teen Israel, was an instant object of fascination among the suit-clad executives, many of whom were twice his age. They were taken with his exotic backstory (he was raised on a kibbutz in southern Israel, not far from the Gaza Strip). But it was his hyper-confidence that one attendee most recalled. "I remember Adam asked me what company leases the most office space in New York. I told him JPMorgan. They have about 3.5 million square feet. And he said, 'Well, I'm going to lease more than they do.' "
It was a delusional idea at the time. Neumann was a college dropout with no commercial real estate experience and a business track record of having launched two failed start-ups: a company that sold women's shoes with a collapsible heel and a line of baby clothes called Krawlers that featured pants with kneepads sewn into the legs. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Neumann had burned through an investment from his grandmother of nearly $100,000 and scrambled to hire a lawyer to renew his visa to stay in the country. To help pay rent, he let another company sublet space in Krawlers's Brooklyn loft.
It was the genesis of the WeWork idea: In the postcrash recession, Neumann had the foresight to bet landlords would need tenants, and that legions of underemployed professionals would pay for an appealing alternative to working from a Starbucks while they got back on their feet. Neumann partnered with a laconic 34-year-old architect named Miguel McKelvey, who grew up on an Oregon commune, and together they convinced Krawlers's landlord to let them convert an unused floor into a shared workspace called Green Desk. The concept did well. A little over a year later, they sold it to the landlord at a reported $3 million valuation and struck out on their own.
Neumann envisioned WeWork as a "capitalist kibbutz" where members would work, eat, and drink together. McKelvey designed WeWork branches that fostered community by keeping hallways narrow and packing in open desks to encourage spontaneous encounters. After hours, members participated in yoga classes, wine tastings, and networking panels. The WeWork aesthetic evoked a cross between a Silicon Valley start-up and a boutique hotel lobby. Offices had clean lines, Danish furniture—no leather or plastic utensils allowed—and neon signs on the walls with phrases like "Hustle Harder." By 2018, Neumann's improbable boast had come true: WeWork surpassed JPMorgan to become New York's largest private office tenant, with some 5 million square feet of office leases spread across more than 50 locations in the city.
But achieving this blistering growth resulted in barely controlled chaos inside the company. "The place made the Trump White House look like a well-oiled machine," a former senior executive said. At WeWork's first headquarters in the Financial District, there were twice as many employees as available desks in the early days. "They scattered employees throughout We Works around the city," a former executive recalled. Neumann had personally reviewed the first hundred leases, but as the company grew, it became a free-for-all. The company voraciously leased office space with seemingly little strategy, except to keep adding locations. To entice new customers, WeWork offered members free rent and bought out their existing leases. " We are in a consumption phase, like nothing that has ever been seen," Neumann declared at an industry conference in 2015. "There was no discipline to how Adam approved leases," an executive said. A broker who worked with the company during this time recalled, "No one knew what anyone was doing."
The torrid pace took a toll on morale. "We would joke that we worked like slaves," a former WeWork employee said. "Adam would have meetings on Sunday, and you could never miss those. And sometimes it wouldn't happen, or it'd happen hours late and you'd be there all night. You'd cry in the bathroom all the time," the employee recalled. At the same time the company was burning money to expand, staffers were made to feel expendable. WeWork's previous CFO Ariel Tiger, who served in the Israeli Navy with Neumann, talked openly about firing people. "Every two weeks Ariel would get a printout of payroll, and he would go through and redline the shit out of it, saying he wanted to reduce peoples' pay," a former executive said. "I remember walking through the office and Ariel would loudly say, 'Why do we have all these people? I could do what they're doing with two people! 'Everyone knew he was Adam's guy." (Tiger did not respond to a request for comment.)
The promise of IPO riches kept many employees from simply quitting. "The numbers they threw out at all-hands meetings was that this is going to be a multibillion-dollar company," a former employee said. The money was only part of it, though. Neumann inculcated in his postcollegiate staff a belief they were members of a vanguard changing the world—or at least a belief they may work in an office but they didn't have to grow up. Employees were expected to attend Neumann's weekly Thank God It's Monday parties and a roving annual retreat called Summer Camp held in different years at an upstate New York compound and an English country estate. The events were one part TED Talk (quantum physicist Michael Brooks gave a lecture) and another part Animal House (employees played beer pong and partied to performances by Florence and the Machine and Two Door Cinema Club).
Until a few years ago, the Neumanns were devout followers of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical faith, and it infused WeWork's office culture. One employee said key meetings were often scheduled for the 18th of the month because 18 is a sacred number in Kabbalah's 32 paths to wisdom. Adam encouraged senior WeWork executives to participate in weekly study sessions with his spiritual adviser at the time, Rabbi Eitan Yardeni. "It was a lot about finding your inner peace and purpose," an executive who attended the meetings recalled.
Neumann's charisma was intoxicating to be around. "If you had to go to war, you wanted him to be your general," a former executive said. "His sense of himself is beyond human," recalled another. Neumann paraded through the office barefoot with celebrities like Drake and Ashton Kutcher and had an unnerving ability to maintain eye contact during conversation, lending him the aura of a guru. "When you're in a room with Adam, he can almost convince you of anything," a former employee said. Neumann used mass gatherings to spread his gospel. "I think the thing that all of us know is that if you want to succeed in this world you have to build something that has intention," he said on stage at Summer Camp in 2013, his hair pulled into a ponytail. "Every one of us is here because it has meaning, because we want to do something that actually makes the world a better place. And we want to make money doing it!" The crowd of thousands exploded in cheers. "So many of the people were young and had never worked in a real company. They bought all of it," a former senior executive said. " I realized after I got there it was a cult."
Neumann's gravitational pull was drawing in the world's biggest investors too. In the spring of 2016, Neumann met Masayoshi Son at a dinner. The following year, Neumann invited Masa to WeWork headquarters. Masa informed Neumann he had precisely 12 minutes to hear a presentation. Afterward, Neumann followed Masa outside to his car, hoping to continue the pitch. Masa told Neumann he didn't think his business plan would work. Neumann's problem was that he needed to think bigger. WeWork shouldn't just be leasing offices to small businesses—it should be leasing office space to all business. Masa scribbled on an iPad the number SoftBank was prepared to invest: $4.4 billion. "Adam dazzled Masa," an investment banker close to both men told me.
Pumped up by SoftBank's billions, Neumann's messianism became more like megalomania. "Adam's fantasy land became a reality," a former WeWork executive said. Neumann sat down with world leaders, discussing the Syrian refugee crisis with Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and urban planning with London mayor Sadiq Khan. "When Adam got in front of world leaders, it was like he started thinking he was one," a former executive said.
"The place made the Trump White House look like a well-oiled machine."
In conversations with people inside and outside the company, Neumann's pronouncements became wilder. He told one investor that he'd convinced Rahm Emanuel to run for president in 2020 on the " WeWork Agenda." (Emanuel did not respond to a request for comment.) Neumann told colleagues that he was saving the women of Saudi Arabia by working with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to offer women coding classes, according to a source. In another meeting, Neumann said three people were going to save the world: bin Salman, Jared Kushner, and Neumann. Shortly after the news broke in October 2018 that Saudi agents tortured dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and carved his body with a bone saw, likely on order from the crown prince himself, Neumann told George W. Bush's former national security adviser Stephen Hadley that everything could be worked out if bin Salman had the right mentor. Confused, Hadley asked who that person might be, according to a source familiar with the meeting. Neumann paused for a moment and said: "Me."
Rebekah Neumann shared her husband's fervor that WeWork was a movement. "From the second I met Adam there was an energy between us that felt like it was larger than just the two of us," she told the style website Coveteur. They married in 2008, the year Green Desk launched, and she took on the role of WeWork's raven-haired five-foot-nine first lady. "I'm responsible for all of the messaging, the mission, the values, and, most importantly staying true to the DNA and mission of what we initially set out to do at WeWork," she told Coveteur She held several titles, including chief brand and impact officer, and cofounder.
Senior executives bristled at Rebekah's nebulous, free-ranging role and her thin resume. Prior to WeWork, she'd lived in Los Angeles trying unsuccessfully to make it as an actress and screenwriter. After college, she spent a few weeks working on Wall Street before quitting, telling a friend the job wasn't for her. "He has a wife who wants to leverage this to be her own major character," said a source who's interacted with Rebekah. Executives wondered why the marketing consultant Jonathan Mildenhall, whom WeWork hired to help develop its brand, was also advising Rebekah on her personal image. (He asked her questions like, "Are you a magician, maverick, or a muse?" said an executive who participated in the session.) At company events, Rebekah interviewed luminaries like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Red Hot Chili Peppers front man Anthony Kiedis.
Crossing Rebekah had consequences. SoulCycle cofounder Julie Rice, who'd been recruited to WeWork in 2017 to become the company's chief brand officer, quit in part because Rebekah decided upon returning from maternity leave that she wanted Rice's title and took it, sources said. (A source close to Rebekah said that Rebekah, as a WeWork cofounder, had always had that title.) Last year, Rebekah fired a mechanic for WeWork's Gulfstream, two executives told me, because she didn't like his energy.
In the fall of 2018, Rebekah opened WeGrow, a for-profit school costing up to $42,000 a year, at WeWork's headquarters. "We couldn't find the school that we felt would nurture growth," she told Fast Company, explaining how she got the idea to create a school for their five children. Rebekah had very specific ideas of what the ideal environment would be. "These children come into the world, they are very evolved, they are very special. They're spiritual," she told Fast Company. "They're all natural entrepreneurs, natural humanitarians, and then it seems like we squash it all out of them in the education system."
She hired Danish architect Bjarke Ingels to design an airy space that featured an indoor "vertical garden" and "acoustic clouds" hanging from the ceiling. To serve as her COO, she recruited education entrepreneur Adam Braun by acquiring Braun's college alternative start-up MissionU for $4 million (Braun's brother is Justin Bieber manager Scooter). The curriculum included classes in mindfulness, yoga, meditation, and farming. Students ate vegetarian meals and were taught Spanish and Mandarin, and parents could enroll their children in their Hebrew language immersion program. Children could even be paired with a professional mentor. "In my book, there's no reason why children in elementary schools can't be launching their own businesses," Rebekah told Bloomberg.
Although many families loved the whimsical little school (more than half the kids received financial aid, the school says), it was not entirely a utopia. Early on, a WeWork administrator called WeWork's HR department in a panic. The school's security guards were threatening to quit because they hadn't been paid in a month, a former executive recalled. It turned out human resources forgot to add them to the payroll, according to a source familiar with the matter. Another source recalled that parents protested Rebekah's rule that nannies picking up children were required to stand in the vestibule while parents were allowed to wait inside the school's lounge. (Rebekah didn't want her own nannies entering the school, two sources said.) "The whole thing was about her and what was right for her children," a person close to the school said.
Adam Neumann, meanwhile, was pushing WeWork in new directions all at once. In January 2019, WeWork rebranded itself The We Company. In addition to WeGrow, it launched an apartment rental division (WeLive) and a gym (Rise by We). WeWork signed deals to provide offices for Fortune 500 companies including Amazon, General Electric, and Facebook. The company tried selling software to companies that mapped how employees used office space (part of what they called "Powered by We"). But the new revenue streams didn't make up for ballooning losses. In 2018, WeWork's revenue climbed to $1.8 billion, but it lost $1.9 billion. "I didn't understand how this was working and the valuation kept going up," a former senior executive said. Employees sensed a bubble. "After Masa invested, I would sit in meetings and we'd talk about growing by 100 million square feet in 2019," recalled another. "And I thought, You can't spend that much money in the right way. "
Being seen as a visionary was part of Neumann's business model—but he increasingly was seen as a flake. Neumann skipped crucial meetings or showed up late for no reason, according to two sources. To secure face time, executives devised a strategy of riding with Neumann to the airport before he jetted off somewhere. Sources told me he basically stopped calling in for WeWork board conference calls. "It was a Vichy board. They had no power. So what the fuck do you do?" said a former senior WeWork executive.
Neumann was becoming increasingly self-destructive. In November 2018, he showed up late, looking hung over, to a meeting with Khaldoon Khalifa Al Mubarak, the CEO and managing director of Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, at the St. Regis in Manhattan, according to a source familiar with the matter. WeWork executives were furious. Mubarak was having doubts about SoftBank's massive bet on WeWork, and Neumann was supposed to reassure him.
Remarkably, Neumann didn't think it mattered. Over the summer, he had negotiated a deal with Masayoshi to sell most of WeWork to SoftBank for $16 billion. WeWork was on track to lose nearly $2 billion, and Neumann had his escape plan. He and his investors would be insanely rich. "This was a pivotal moment," a former WeWork executive recalled. "Adam was acting like the SoftBank deal was done, and we would be flush with cash."
On Christmas Eve 2018, Masa called Neumann from Japan with the news that SoftBank wouldn't be buying most of WeWork after all. Instead, SoftBank would invest $2 billion more in WeWork at an eye-popping $47 billion valuation. It was supposed to buy Neumann enough breathing room to take WeWork public.
Neumann was blindsided by Masa's reversal and did what countless others have done seeking a new start—he headed west. That January, the Neumanns relocated to their mansion in Corte Madera, just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco. They brought their household staff and a teacher from WeGrow with them and planned to spend two months on the West Coast as Neumann hunted for deals. According to sources, he pitched Apple CFO Luca Maestri on doing a deal with WeWork. It's unclear why Apple would want to invest in WeWork, and not surprisingly, the company passed. (Apple didn't respond to a request for comment.) Neumann went to Google and proposed a partnership. They too passed. Neumann batted around other investment ideas. He earlier discussed buying Slack. "He sat there saying, 'What companies can we buy? Maybe we should buy Slack?' " a former executive recalled.
When Neumann returned to WeWork's New York headquarters later that winter, he seemed desperate. He barked orders and haphazardly reorganized divisions, at one point having as many as 20 direct reports, according to a former WeWork executive. "Masa said we're gonna be a trillion-dollar company!" he shouted, according to a former executive who heard it. "You're thinking billions and we should be thinking trillions! You people need to be better than you are!" Neumann seemed shocked by the scale of WeWork's losses. Sources said he tangled with WeWork's then-CFO Artie Minson over the cash squeeze. Minson declined to comment but a former senior executive said Neumann drove the decision making. "Nothing could happen without Adam."
Former executives said Neumann often reacted poorly. "You don't bring bad news to the cult leader," one said.
Neumann argued WeWork would survive the cash crunch because its gargantuan size gave Neumann the leverage to force WeWork's landlords to renegotiate leases at lower prices, according to a real estate executive. "In the major cities in the world, WeWork is propping up the office market," he told a colleague around this time. "If I say 'pencils down' to my people, the value of buildings will plunge, and I can go in and buy them on the cheap." The executive was chilled by the conversation. "We're not talking about a Harvard Business School analysis here. This has a predatory aspect to it."
WeWork's venture capital investors, meanwhile, had collectively poured more than $12 billion into the company, and they wanted to cash out. With no private buyer, the only option was to go public. "Adam never wanted to go public," a former executive said. "His ideal was Bloomberg. He wanted to remain private so he could do whatever the fuck he wanted."
It didn't help that Neumann was racing to find a financial lifeline as a darker side of his company was appearing in the papers. In October 2018, Ruby Anaya, WeWork's 33-year-old director of culture, sued the company, citing its "entitled, frat-boy culture" and claiming she had been fired after she reported to human resources that she had been sexually assaulted at a work event. The suit alleged that when Anaya walked offstage after presenting an award at a WeWork conference in January 2018, an intoxicated male employee forcibly kissed her. The lawsuit cited an earlier incident from Summer Camp in 2017, in which a drunk coworker allegedly groped her from behind. After both episodes, HR failed to discipline the men, the suit said. " It was awful," Anaya told me when we met one afternoon last fall. "I remember saying [to HR], who has to say something for it to be believed, Rebekah? Who is safe here? No one is safe." (A WeWork spokesperson said, "WeWork's new executive chairman Marcelo Claure has made clear he will not tolerate behavior of the kind alleged in this lawsuit.")
A more immediate problem was the air the unicorn bubble was leaking—fast. Uber shares debuted down nearly 10 percent. "The whole world shifted," a senior WeWork executive said. "Uber was a big part of it. The narrative of the unicorn was ending. Had we gotten out before that narrative shifted, we would have been fine."
WeWork's failed IPO vaporized as much as $40 billion of shareholder value in two months—a unicorn extinction event, at least in the near term. It was comparable to the end of tulipomania.
Those who are losing the most are WeWork's beleaguered staff, many of whom had small equity stakes. They'd believed deeply in Neumann, worked insane hours, and bought in fully to the WeWork dream. "They pushed the narrative that this is your family, and you're supposed to spend a lot of time with them. It was somewhat incestuous. It was like we were at war together," a former staffer said. The company's IPO, the blessed liquidity event, was part of their faith, built into their worldview. Now, thousands may lose their jobs, and any equity is a distant dream. It's hard to overstate their fury at Neumann, who's walking away a billionaire. Recently, the New York Times reported a group of WeWork employees circulated an open letter calling Neumann's payout "graft." "This company was designed and managed to make a handful of people ungodly wealthy at the expense of everyone," a former executive told me.
But WeWork was a group delusion, and Neumann is not the only guilty party. "SoftBank deserves a lot of responsibility," a former WeWork executive told me. " It's very difficult for anyone to control themselves if you have a sugar daddy like Masa." Neumann is telling friends he took the fall for financial decisions WeWork's board of directors and his advisers had all approved. He complains that he never wanted to sell the We trademark back to the company, but WeWork lawyers told him he couldn't give it away for free, people familiar with the transaction said. (WeWork didn't respond to a request for comment.) He feels victimized by the media and he insists the WeWork buildings he owned were actually money-losing investments. He bought them to prove the WeWork concept to skeptical landlords during the company's early days.
Wall Street too deserves blame, he's told people. Just last spring, bankers from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan were throwing themselves at him, trying to secure WeWork's IPO and the estimated $100 million in fees it would generate. Neumann tells people bankers told him that WeWork could be worth $90 billion. It wasn't strictly Neumann's fault that investors no longer had the appetite for money-burning start-ups like Uber and Slack. WeWork's botched S-1 is Wall Street's fault, he told people. Why didn't the bankers and lawyers warn Neumann the disclosures he put in the S-1 would spark an investor backlash, he asks his friends. Having once been a prophet, he now speaks of himself as a martyr, people close to him say.
The more Neumann stewed, the more he came to believe he was the target of a coup. Powerful interests wanted him out of the company, he tells friends. The crash of WeWork's IPO meant that investors who had pumped billions into WeWork were suddenly at risk of losing their shirts, and now they wanted to collect. Sources told me his prime suspect is Benchmark Capital. In 2017, Benchmark led a boardroom putsch that ousted Kalanick from Uber, and later sued Kalanick to force him off Uber's board. Neumann's suspicions of Benchmark increased when he learned that investor Michael Eisenberg, a Benchmark general partner, rallied WeWork board members to dump Neumann after the delayed IPO, sources said. (Eisenberg did not respond to a request for comment.)
For now, the Neumanns' dream is over. In September, the company announced it was getting rid of the Gulfstream and closing Rebekah's school. They withdrew all five of their kids. He tells friends he wants to learn from his crash. In his office, he keeps a card with three lessons he wrote: Listen. Be on time. Be a good partner. He thought about flying to Tokyo to see his onetime patron Masayoshi Son but decided not to. He tried drafting a letter to WeWork employees, but as of mid-November, he hadn't figured out what to say.
