Don’t count Adam Neumann.
The embarrassed former CEO of WeWork would have lost his empire, but an insider told The Post that Neumann, 41, is already planning his mysterious business move.
“It involves what happened in the world because of the pandemic,” the insider said. “He has big plans and is waiting for the right moment to announce them.”
It seems Neumann has not seen Hulu’s new documentary, “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $ 47 Billion Unicorn,” which details his spectacular rise and fall as CEO of the once-hot office space start-up.
The entrepreneur is described in the documentary as a charismatic but excited charlatan who convinced the financial mutants – from Jamie Dimon of Chase Bank to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son – to guide him and give him billions for WeWork first and foremost. to go very badly in August 2019
Close friends and family members “described” the film to him, but his upturned fist does not look or read things about himself, said a post in The Post.
Instead, he took refuge in his home in Greenwich Village with his wife, Rebekah, and five children, working on the “brand new” business.
Neumann has not spoken publicly since leaving the company in September 2019, six weeks after his municipal office company filed documents for an IPO, with an impressive valuation of $ 47 billion. But that valuation fell by half the following month and the IPO failed amid revelations that the company was losing money and that its growth projections were extremely optimistic. Adding to this: reports of Neumann’s rock ‘n’ roll excesses, including wild spending and marijuana use on a private plane and financial irregularities.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Neumann was paid $ 1.7 billion in exchange for severing most of his ties to WeWork.
He was also mocked for making statements about wanting to live forever and referring to WeWork – essentially an office space sublease business – as something that would “raise the world’s consciousness.”
After losing their business, their family and nannies moved to Israel to stay for a few months. In a move to “simplify” life, the source said, the Neumannians have sold at least three of the six properties reported in the estimated $ 90 million portfolio, including one of their Hamptons homes, one in Westchester and a luxury Gramercy Park compound.
But three people who know Neumann, who grew up on a kibbutz in Israel for a while, told The Post that he does not lick his wounds or hide his head in shame – despite the fact that he fell off Forbes list of billionaires in 2020, after its net fund fell from a maximum of $ 14 billion to $ 750 million.
“He feels he has made mistakes, but he feels that the media has made a sensation out of 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 it built it … It has hundreds of locations. I don’t know too many people who can build such a company in 10 years. ”
He also received support from unlikely people.
“I feel weird defending a competitor (sometimes quite sharp), but I’m worried about these WeWork documents and movies,” Jamie Hodari, CEO and co-founder of Industrious, a WeWork rival, recently wrote on LinkedIn.
Hodari told The Post that he believes Neumann’s problematic reputation has unfairly tarnished WeWork as a whole.
“Separating the way Adam behaved professionally, you can’t ignore the fact that the guy built a $ 9 billion company,” Hodari said. “Very few people have done that in such a short time.”
Mick McConnell, a senior vice president at WeWork who is no longer in contact with Neumann, told The Post that he believed Neumann was overly demonized.
“Adam has assembled a team of people who have never been seen before,” said McConnell, who is writing a book about WeWork. “We have produced space – something that had not been done before – and we have changed the way architecture and development will be done from this moment on. Collaboration will become even more relevant as people start working more in the office. ”
Neumann launched WeWork in 2010 with co-founder Miguel McKelvey, who is barely mentioned in the documentary, and his wife Rebekah, a cousin of Gwyneth Paltrow.
Rebekah, 42, a former aspiring actress and yoga instructor, is portrayed as a toxic lady, New Age Lady Macbeth, in both the documentary and her husband’s recent biography, “Billion Dollar Loser.” , by Reeves Wiedeman.
According to Wiedeman, Rebekah’s fingerprints were the key to the company’s near-implosion in August 2019, when WeWork filed Form S-1 ahead of a planned IPO.
Neumannes didn’t seem concerned that the document, codenamed “Wingspan,” revealed $ 1.6 billion in We Work losses – which terrified investors. Instead, Rebekah Neumann, whose title was Chief Brand and Impact Officer, commissioned a Vanity Fair photographer to take photos with celebrities and influencers such as Anna Faris, Aimee Song, Ron Howard and Arianna Huffington at WeWork and included them in deposit.
An insider who knew the couple said some people expected Neumann to leave Rebekah after the embarrassing removal from the company.
“By no means,” the source said. “Adam and Rebekah are devoted to each other and devoted to those children. There could be no greater contrast to the way Adam is publicly portrayed and what a family man he is. ”
Rebekah, who started a “conscious entrepreneurship school” for children at WeWork called “WeGrow,” hopes to rebrand and relaunch it as a new enterprise called “Students for Life” or SOLFL (pronounced “soulful”) now that WeWork sold the WeGrow rights back to her.
Meanwhile, Neumann – who has not undergone therapy or any rehabilitation, an associate said – has invested in a number of start-ups, including a tech mortgage service, a residential concierge service called Alfred and some Israeli companies.
He also came out of hiding in November to facilitate a deal between the head of a special-purpose procurement company and SoftBank, the now-majority owner of WeWork, which set the stage for his former company’s future IPO.
SoftBank initially saved WeWork after its first disastrous attempt to go public.
“[Adam’s] another positive, happy guy, “an associate told The Post. “He feels humiliated, yes, but he came to stay.”