Looking out over his legion of WeWork employees in the third episode of AppleTV+’s WeCrashed, founder and CEO Adam Neumann (played by Jared Leto) leads his team in a call and response chant: We! Work! We! Work! before they all take tequila shots. It’s a scene depicting one of the company’s signature “Thank God It’s Monday” parties to kick off the work week, and in that moment, it's pretty easy to see why Neumann was later pushed out of the company he founded in scandal. Though he without a doubt created an incredibly toxic work culture, his story most certainly makes for entertaining TV. Here’s where Neumann is today, nearly three years after his departure from WeWork. With a valuation of $47 billion in January of 2019, Adam Neumann set out to take the company public. But his erratic behavior and lavish spending habits led investors to question his leadership abilities—plus, after they reassessed the business, it was determined that WeWork, which Neumann co-founded with Miquel McKelvey in 2010, might actually be valued closer to $15 billion. In September of 2019, after the company decided to delay its IPO, the board of WeWork forced Neumann to step down as CEO. “Since the announcement of our I.P.O., too much of the focus has been placed on me,” Neumann wrote in a note to employees at the time. But in order to walk away from the company and give up his voting rights, Neumann received about $1.7 billion in stock, cash, and credit, and then in February of 2021, another $50 million settlement from WeWork investor SoftBank. He also, according to the Wall Street Journal, still owns $2 billion worth of WeWork stock today. So all things considered, he’s not doing too bad financially, at the very least. Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey at a WeWork party in London in 2015. David M. BenettAfter he stepped down, he and his wife Rebekah Paltrow Neumann spent some time in Israel (where Adam is originally from) to stay out of the public eye. They returned to the Hamptons in May of 2020, according to Forbes. He also began offloading some of his real estate—such as his Gramercy three-floor penthouse suite and a second duplex apartment for $37.5 million, a 5.6-acre Westchester estate for $3.4 million, his Hamptons home for $1.25 million, and his San Francisco compound for $27.5 million. (At the time, he still owned a $10.3 million Greenwich Village townhouse, as well as a $15 million, 60-acre farm in Westchester County, so don’t worry, he still had options.) In the summer of 2020, Rebekah Neumann re-acquired the rights to the curriculum of WeGrow, a defunct private school that was created in 2018 as the education arm of Neumann’s “We” brand, with apparent plans to re-launch it. The $42,000-per-year elementary school housed in WeWork’s Chelsea location had shut down when Neumann’s initial IPO attempt failed in 2019. According to Forbes, Neumann had planned to relaunch the school, which counted both yoga and entrepreneurship as core parts of its curriculum, as Student of Life For Life (SOLFL, pronounced “soulful”). Though the school has a website and an Instagram page, it does not appear to have reopened in any capacity. Adam and Rebekah Neumann at the Time 100 gala in 2018. Taylor Hill//Getty ImagesIn October of 2020, Adam Neumann led a $42 million investment round in Alfred, which CNN describes as “a startup that works with residential buildings to provide a concierge-like services for residents.” Neumann himself had launched a similar project in 2016 with WeLive, which were co-housing spaces in New York City and Arlington, VA. Both locations are now closed. When WeWork finally did IPO in October of 2021, Adam Neumann threw a party—not funded by or affiliated with the company—for more than 100 early employees at the Standard Hotel in New York’s meatpacking district. Though he and his cofounder Miguel McKelvey hadn’t been seen together since Neumann’s ousting, McKelvey attended the celebration alongside him. “The irony is not lost on the fact that they are inviting former employees who got no money from the company they nearly destroyed, and in some cases, some who were laid off after the last IPO attempt,” an insider told the New York Post. “And it is day drinking just like the olden days at WeWork.” Lauren KrancAssistant Content Strategy Editor Lauren Kranc is the assistant content strategy editor at Esquire, where she runs the brand’s social media accounts and covers pop culture and television, with entirely too narrow an expertise on true crime shows This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
Photo: Lindsey Nicholson/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images After a failed public offering and spectacular implosion that led to the resignation of perennially barefooted co-founder Adam Neumann, WeWork wants to be redeemed. With the rise of pandemic-era flex offices, the post-Neumann WeWork is reportedly seeing its chance to grow. When asked at a recent event about WeCrashed’s prestige take on his company’s collapse, new CEO Sandeep Mathrani said he was waiting for the sequel: “We Crushed It.” (Was WeCrushed taken?) In the past, the company burned through cash to buy leases at above-market rates, pursuing a “growth at all costs” model that ultimately collapsed. The plan now, its executives say, is to move slowly. When asked by the Commercial Observer how fast it was expecting to grow, Peter Greenspan, the global head of real estate, deflected. “We do have some incredible locations in the pipeline that will be opening over the next year,” he said. “In addition to that, we have been working with landlords on various types of asset-light financial structures, which is really the way the industry is going to have to work going forward.” He added, “To give you a number today wouldn’t be responsible.” It could work? Companies are still uncertain about their return-to-office plans, and WeWork could capitalize on the disarray. Start-ups are reportedly turning to WeWork for its “low-commitment” office spaces, and landlords are looking to make deals. Still, the company reported a $435 million loss in the first quarter of 2022, and it’s gone through three different CFOs in two years. It’s still WeWorking it out. WeWork Thinks It’s a Good Time to be WeWork
(CNN Business) Nearly three years after Adam Neumann stepped down as CEO of WeWork following a failed attempt to take the company public, he is said to once again be in charge of a billion-dollar real estate startup. Andreessen Horowitz, the prominent venture capital firm known for its early investments in Twitter and Airbnb, has pumped about $350 million into Neumann's newest venture, called Flow, according to The New York Times, citing unnamed sources briefed on the deal. The investment valued the startup at more than $1 billion, according to the report. Representatives for Flow and Andreessen Horowitz did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In a blog post Monday, Marc Andreessen, cofounder and general partner at the VC firm, announced the investment, without disclosing financial details. He also explained his thinking for backing Flow, a residential real estate company, and Neumann despite the founder's high-profile fall from grace at WeWork. "Adam is a visionary leader who revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world — commercial real estate — by bringing community and brand to an industry in which neither existed before," Andreessen wrote in his post Monday. "Adam, and the story of WeWork, have been exhaustively chronicled, analyzed, and fictionalized — sometimes accurately. For all the energy put into covering the story, it's often under appreciated that only one person has fundamentally redesigned the office experience and led a paradigm-changing global company in the process: Adam Neumann." It's not immediately clear how Flow seeks to revolutionize the residential housing industry. Flow currently has a bare bones website, with the slogan "Live life in flow" and two words stating it will launch in 2023. Andreessen positioned the new company as a long-awaited solution to the nation's "housing crisis." He used a mix of jargon-filled terms — "community-driven, experience-centric service" — to explain how the new startup would "create a system where renters receive the benefits of owners." "We think it is natural that for his first venture since WeWork, Adam returns to the theme of connecting people through transforming their physical spaces and building communities where people spend the most time: their homes," Andreessen wrote. "Residential real estate — the world's largest asset class — is ready for exactly this change." Under Neumann's leadership, WeWork expanded from shared coworking spaces with elaborate perks to experiment with gyms, a school and housing. The last of those efforts, called WeLive, let customers rent a bed or private room in a coliving location, with common spaces available for yoga, ping-pong and more. Once valued at $47 billion on the private market at its peak, WeWork went through a disastrous attempt to go public, foiled in large part by IPO paperwork that revealed Neumann's unchecked power and numerous potential conflicts of interest, as well as WeWork's staggering losses. Neumann ultimately was ousted from his chief executive role at WeWork, but walked away with an exit package reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars. WeWork's dramatic rise and spectacular failed first attempt at going public inspired a TV show, which partly portrayed Neumann as the poster child of startup culture's excess. WeWork ultimately went public via a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in 2021. WeWork currently has a market value of about $4 billion. |