No Adam Neumann count.
It is possible that the former WeWork CEO, unfortunately, has lost his empire, but an expert told The Post that Neumann, 41, is already plotting his mysterious business move.
“It involves what happened in the world because of the pandemic,” the informant said. “He has big plans and is waiting for the right time to announce them.”
Neumann has reportedly not seen Hulu’s new and entertaining documentary “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $ 47 Billion Unicorn” detailing his spectacular rise and fall as CEO of the office’s startup.
The businessman is portrayed in the documentary as a charismatic but excited charlatan who convinced financial proponents, from Chase Bank’s Jamie Dimon to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, to mentor him and give him billions for WeWork before everything went very badly in August 2019.
Close friends and family have “described” the film to him, but the punchline turned unknown man doesn’t see or read things about himself, an informant told The Post.
Instead, he has been welcomed into his Greenwich Village home with his wife, Rebekah, and five children, working at the new company.
Neumann has not spoken publicly since he left the company in September 2019, six weeks after his communal office company filed documents for a IPO, with a valuable valuation of $ 47 billion. But that valuation fell by half during the following month and the IPO failed amid revelations that the company was losing money and that its growth projections were tremendously optimistic. Adding: reports of Neumann rock and roll excesses, including wild spending and marijuana use on a private jet, and financial irregularities.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Neumann was paid $ 1.7 billion in exchange for breaking most of his ties to WeWork.
He has also been ridiculed for statements about wanting to live forever and referring to WeWork (essentially an office space sublease business) as something that would “raise awareness in the world”.
After losing the business, the family and their nannies left for Israel to stay down for several months. To a measure aimed at “simplifying” life, according to the source, the Neumanns have sold at least three of the six properties reported in their estimated $ 90 million portfolio, including one of their homes in Hamptons, one in Westchester and a luxury Gramercy Park compound.
But three people who know Neumann, who grew up for a time in a kibbutz in Israel, told The Post that he doesn’t lick his wounds or hide his embarrassed head, despite falling off Forbes ’list of billionaires in 2020 after that its net worth plummeted from a maximum of $ 14 billion to $ 750 million.
“He feels he made mistakes, but he also feels that the media caused a sensation with certain elements of the story,” a source familiar with the situation told The Post.
“The valuation of $ 47 billion was probably a mistake. But WeWork is still a good company and built it … It has hundreds of locations. I don’t know too many people who can build a company like this in ten years. “
It has also received the support of some unlikely people.
“I feel weird defending a competitor (sometimes quite sharp), but I’m concerned about these WeWork documents and movies,” Jamie Hodari, CEO and co-founder of WeWork rival Industrial, wrote recently on LinkedIn.
Hodari told The Post that he believes Neumann’s troubled reputation has unfairly discredited WeWork as a whole.
“Separating how Adam behaved professionally, one cannot ignore the fact that the boy built a $ 9 billion business,” Hodari said. “Very few people have done it and in such a short time.”
Mick McConnell, a former WeWork senior vice president who is no longer in contact with Neumann, told The Post that he believed Neumann had been overly demonized.
“Adam brought together a team of people who had never been seen before,” said McConnell, who writes a book about WeWork. “We have produced the space, something that had never been done before, and we have changed the way we do architecture and development from that moment on. Collaborative work will be even more relevant as people start working outside the office even more so. ”
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 yoga actress and instructor, is portrayed as a toxic New Age Lady Macbeth woman, both in the documentary and in her husband’s recent biography, “Billion Dollar Loser,” by Reeves Wiedeman .
According to Wiedeman, Rebekah’s fingerprints were the key element of the company’s practical implosion in August 2019, when WeWork filed Form S-1 ahead of a planned IPO.
The Neumanns did not seem concerned that the document, codenamed “Wingspan”, would reveal We Work’s $ 1.6 billion loss, which horrified investors. Instead, Rebekah Neumann, whose title was Chief Brand and Impact Officer, commissioned a Vanity Fair photographer to take photos of celebrities and influencers such as Anna Faris, Aimee Song, Ron Howard and Arianna Huffington at WeWork. , and included them in the presentation.
A person who knows the couple said some people expected Neumann to leave Rebekah after his embarrassing retirement from the company.
“By no means,” the source said. “Adam and Rebekah are dedicated to each other and are dedicated to these children. There could be no greater contrast to the way Adam is publicly represented and what a family man he is. ”
Rebekah, who started a “conscious entrepreneurial school” for children within WeWork called “WeGrow,” hopes to change the brand and relaunch itself as a new company called “Students for Life” or SOLFL (pronounced “soulful”) now that WeWork has sold the WeGrow rights back to him.
Meanwhile, Neumann, who has not undergone any therapy or rehabilitation, an associate said, has invested in several companies that include a tech mortgage service, a residential concierge service called Alfred and some Israeli companies.
He also came out secretly in November to facilitate an agreement between the head of a special-purpose acquisition company and SoftBank, now the majority owner of WeWork, which paved the way for the next $ 9 billion dollars from his former company.
SoftBank originally rescued WeWork after its first disastrous attempt to make itself public.
“[Adam’s] he’s still a positive, happy guy, ”an associate told The Post.“ He feels humiliated, yes, but he’s here to stay. ”