Do not exclude Adam Neumann.
The disgraced former WeWork CEO may have lost his empire, but a source told the Post that Neumann, 41, is already planning his mysterious next business move.
“It involves what happened in the world because of the pandemic,” said the source. “He has big plans and is waiting for the right moment to announce them.”
Neumann reportedly missed the new Hulu documentary “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $ 47 Billion Unicorn”, which details his spectacular rise and fall as CEO of the once-rising hot office space.
The businessman is portrayed in the documentary as a charismatic but deluded charlatan who persuaded financial agents – from Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank to CEO Masayoshi Son of SoftBank – to guide him and give him billions for WeWork before everything went wrong in August 2019.
Close friends and family “described” the film to him, but the prodigy who became a joke doesn’t watch or read things about himself, a source told the Post.
Instead, he is holed up at his home in Greenwich Village with his wife, Rebekah, and five children, working on a “brand new” development.
Neumann has not spoken publicly since he left the company in September 2019, six weeks after his communal office space company filed documents for an IPO, boasting an astonishing $ 47 billion valuation. But that valuation dropped by half in the following month and the IPO failed amid revelations that the company was losing money and that its growth projections were extremely optimistic. Add to that: reports of Neumann’s rock ‘n’ roll excesses, including overspending and marijuana use on board a private jet, and financial irregularities.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Neumann received $ 1.7 billion in exchange for breaking most of his ties with WeWork.
He was also widely ridiculed for declaring his desire to live forever and referring to WeWork – essentially an office sublease business – as something that “would raise the world’s awareness”.
After losing the business, the family and their nannies moved to Israel to be quiet for several months. In a move to “simplify” life, the source said, the Neumanns sold at least three of the six properties reported in their estimated $ 90 million portfolio, including one of their homes in the Hamptons, one in Westchester and a luxurious Gramercy Park compound.
But three people who know Neumann, who grew up for a while in a kibbutz in Israel, told the Post that he is not licking his wounds or hiding his head in shame – despite falling off the Forbes list of billionaires in 2020 after his net worth plummeted from a maximum of $ 14 billion to $ 750 million.
“He feels that he has made mistakes, but he also feels that the media has caused a sensation with certain elements of the story,” a source familiar with the situation told the Post.
“The $ 47 billion valuation was probably a mistake. But WeWork is still a good company and he built it … It has hundreds of locations. I don’t know many people who can build a company like this in 10 years. “
He also got support from some unlikely people.
“I feel awkward defending a competitor (sometimes quite aggressive), but I am concerned about these WeWork documents and films,” Jamie Hodari, CEO and co-founder of Industrious, a rival of WeWork, recently wrote on LinkedIn.
Hodari told the Post that he thinks Neumann’s troubled reputation has tainted WeWork as a whole unfairly.
“Separating how Adam behaved professionally, you can’t ignore the fact that the guy built a $ 9 billion company,” said Hodari. “Very few people have done this and in such a short time.”
Mick McConnell, a former senior vice president at WeWork who is no longer in contact with Neumann, told the Post that he thought Neumann had been overly demonized.
“Adam has assembled a team of people never seen before,” said McConnell, who is writing a book on WeWork. “We produced the space – something that had never been done before – and we changed the way architecture and development will be done from now on. Working together will become even more relevant as people start to work even more out of the office. “
Neumann launched WeWork in 2010 with co-founder Miguel McKelvey, who is barely mentioned in the documentary, and his wife Rebekah, Gwyneth Paltrow’s cousin.
Rebekah, 42, a former aspiring actress and yoga instructor, is painted as a toxic New Age Lady Macbeth in the documentary and recent biography of her husband, “Billion Dollar Loser”, by Reeves Wiedeman.
According to Wiedeman, Rebekah’s fingerprints were the key element of the company’s near-implosion in August 2019, when WeWork filled out its S-1 form before a planned IPO.
The Neumanns seemed unconcerned that the document, code-named “Wingspan”, revealed losses of $ 1.6 billion from We Work – which horrified investors. Instead, Rebekah Neumann, whose title was Chief Brand and Impact Officer, hired a Vanity Fair photographer to take pictures of celebrities and influencers like Anna Faris, Aimee Song, Ron Howard and Arianna Huffington in WeWork spaces and included them in the process.
A source who knows the couple said that some people expected Neumann to say goodbye to Rebekah after his shameful departure from the company.
“No way,” said the source. “Adam and Rebekah are dedicated to each other and dedicated to these children. There could be no greater contrast between the way Adam is portrayed publicly and how he is a family man. “
Rebekah, who started a “school of conscientious entrepreneurship” for children within WeWork called “WeGrow”, is supposedly hoping to overhaul and relaunch it as a new venture called “Students for Life” or SOLFL (pronounced “soulful” ) now that WeWork has sold the WeGrow rights back to her.
Meanwhile, Neumann – who has not undergone therapy or any form of rehabilitation, said one associate – has invested in a number of startups, including a technology-enabled mortgage service, a residential concierge service called Alfred and some Israeli companies.
He also came out of hiding in November to facilitate an agreement between the head of a special-purpose acquisition company and SoftBank, the now majority owner of WeWork, which set the stage for the IPO of his former $ 9 billion company. .
SoftBank originally bailed out WeWork after its first disastrous attempt to go public.
“[Adam’s] he’s still a positive and happy guy, ”said an associate of The Post. “He does feel humiliated, yes, but he is here to stay.”