Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork

by Reeves Wiedeman

“Either Adam will end up in jail, or he’ll become a millionaire.” —Adam Neumann’s high school driving instructor

Visitors to Adam’s office over the years, as WeWork moved from one headquarters to another, were often struck by the fact that as his company got better at squeezing workers into ever-smaller spaces, Neumann’s personal office kept getting bigger and bigger.

“We’re not going to Africa because we think that’s a huge growth opportunity,” Neumann told me. He described the decision to open in South Africa as a duty, given what he says he knew about “how we affect the GDP, how we affect employment.”

WeWork would be “a capitalist kibbutz,” he said. “On the one hand, community. On the other hand, you eat what you kill.”

He later described his navy career in varying terms depending on his audience, telling early WeWork employees he was a flunky who applied for submarine duty despite his height, while boasting to a friend, over drinks at a chic bar in the West Village, that he had been in command of a warship in the Persian Gulf.

The next day, they told Schreiber that WeWork, which didn’t have a single location, was worth $45 million. Without asking questions or pushing back, Schreiber agreed to commit $15 million to fund the idea in exchange for a third of a company that did not yet exist.

When Kyle O’Keefe-Sally pointed out that Adam wore a T-shirt and jeans most days, as he was at that moment, Adam replied that his shirts were from James Perse and cost $200. “This is different than the T-shirts you wear,” Adam said. “I look like someone people want to be.”

The center hawked candles with names like Sexual Energy and Dialing God as well as Kabbalah Mountain Spring Water, which the Bergs claimed could cure various ailments. (The water came from a treatment plant in Canada.)

When Adam eventually met Parker, he gave him an informal WeWork pitch: “I’m doing The Social Network, but the physical social network.” Parker never invested.

an entrepreneurial arts and crafts hackathon challenged attendees to come up with the worst possible business idea—something to outdo onesies with knee pads. Five Flags, an amusement park that only sold tickets through the DMV, had won the first competition.

During a company ski trip, a WeWork employee remembers watching as Adam and several executives grabbed waiters’ trays from the hotel bar so they could go sledding. When a hotel employee asked them to stop, Neumann yelled, “Fuck that—I could buy this hotel!” Later that night, a few WeWork designers decided that the hotel’s furniture was laid out all wrong. The next morning, the entire lobby was rearranged. WeWork was asked not to come back.

WeWork kicked two nonprofits out of their offices in downtown San Francisco when it offered to pay the building’s landlord double the rent in order to take over the space from the organizations, both of which worked to prevent tenants from being evicted from their homes in San Francisco.

he saw that many people close to Adam were being handsomely rewarded. Meanwhile, the company had forgotten to renew its corporate health-care plan, leaving rank-and-file employees without their insurance for a month.

When a woman finally joined the engineering staff, the team scrambled to rewrite the underlying code because they had described a reddish color in the design as “hooker’s blood.”

an employee asked a WeWork member about the idea of a WeWork-branded energy drink. “There’s not milk for coffee consistently,” the member said. “Can we fix that first?”

“The nature of the private markets is that if nine smart investors pass, it only takes one relatively dumber investor, and suddenly we’re valued at $16 billion,” the finance team member said.

He began telling people he would become the richest person they would ever meet. “I want to have the biggest valuation I can, because when countries are shooting at each other, I want them to come to me,” Adam said during a conversation about the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis and how WeWork might help solve it.

He offered a warning to the entrepreneurs in the room. “I’ll tell you another secret,” he said. “Your business has to make sense. If the business is not making sense, if you’re not profitable at the end—yes, there are a few companies, we hear about them, they lose a lot of money every month. Don’t build that.”

Rebekah had no formal training in education; her biography on the school’s site would eventually say that she had spent time “apprenticing and studying under many Master Students, such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Mother Nature herself.”

Rebekah went on to express her gratitude to Adi Neumann, who was in the crowd, for funding Adam’s early life back in New York. “You helped him create the biggest family in the world,” Rebekah said. “A big part of being a woman is to help men manifest their calling in life.”